UMBRAL - 3D ASCII CITY

UMBRAL is a first-person city you can walk through. Every pixel ofthe image is a text character. It is not a text-mode game - it isreal 3D geometry lit and rendered in WebGL, then converted intoglyphs by a post-process shader. Buildings, streets, cars,pedestrians, interiors. All of it.

The whole project runs in a single HTML file. No installer, nodependencies, no server, no connection. Download it, open it, youare in the street.

THE CITY

- 7.88 km² of walkable city, split into 5 districts

- 1,521 city blocks

- Enterable buildings with procedurally furnished interiors

- Working elevators and walkable roofs

- A 64-floor tower - The Meridian

- Traffic with lanes, braking and intersection signals

- Pedestrians with procedural walking and traffic-light waiting

- A day and night cycle with dynamic window and street lighting

- Real reflections on wet streets and water

- Three palettes: full colour, green phosphor, amber

Three named landmarks anchor the map: AFTERHOURS (a cafe),Clementine House (a residence) and The Meridian

CONTROLS

W A S D to walk. Shift to run. Space to jump. E to use doors andobjects. M for the city map. V for the aerial view. H for CleanView. Esc for settings.

On mobile: left stick to walk, drag the world to look, and JUMP,RUN and USE buttons on the right.

TECHNICAL NOTES

WebGL 1. One main shader, one ASCII post-process shader, one skypass. No external libraries.

Geometry is built in a Web Worker so the main thread stays free.Nearby blocks are detailed on demand and cached; distant ones fallback to a lighter level of detail. The engine adjusts its ownrendering profile automatically if performance drops.

Humans and cars share immutable meshes. Only transforms and an11-joint palette are animated. Reflections are cached mirror passesthat only recompute when the camera, the hour or the canvas sizechange enough to matter.

Audio is synthesized at runtime through the Web Audio API. Wind,engines, footsteps, doors, lifts. There are no sound files.

LICENSE

Personal, non-transferable. Use it on your own devices. Recordvideos, stream it, review it - even monetized content is fine, aslong as you are not redistributing the original files. Do not resell, reupload or share the file itself.

Full license inside the download.