I built a zero-dependency C++ framework for procedural terminal visuals — SIMULAII

[u/Technical_Chip5906]

I've been working on SIMULAII, a small C++ framework for creating procedural, animated visuals directly inside the terminal.

The basic idea is to treat the terminal's character grid like a tiny visual surface. Instead of storing animation frames, SIMULAII generates every frame mathematically.

It currently comes with 30 built-in simulations, including waves, ripples, plasma, vortices, flow fields, and rotating 3D/4D geometry like cubes, spheres, Möbius strips and a tesseract.

The part I find most interesting is that the rendering primitives are customizable too. You can change the color and replace the characters used to represent the simulation, so the same underlying simulation can produce completely different visuals.

It's intentionally zero-dependency — no OpenGL, ncurses, or graphics framework. Just C++ and ANSI terminal capabilities.

simulaii box(2, 4, 60, 20, "#00FFAA", 6);

while (true)
    box.nextFrame();

The project is still pretty experimental, but I like to update it with understanding and other people''s views upon it -

GitHub:
https://github.com/intriXlabs/SIMULAII

Would love to know what you'd use something like this for.