Have you ever wanted to see what the Earth looks like in text form?
Well, allow me to introduce ASCII-Globe, a program I made that dynamically renders the Earth in ASCII art.
Demo
Here's a flattened text version. Feel free to copy and paste it.
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ASCII-Globe uses a bit of Python code I wrote that renders text onto a simulated 3D sphere.
It does this with the same trigonometry that all rendering engines use, so I won't explain it in detail here.
ASCII-Globe also supports features such as rotation, tilt, scale, and a day-night cycle. It accomplishes the day-night cycle by switching between a day texture and a night texture, and the rest are achieved with more trigonometry.
Texture Generation
ASCII-Globe works with any 202x80 character .txt file, but for the people who don't want to manually design a 16,160 character texture, it also comes with some image-to-txt code. The texture generator's default behavior (as described in the documentation) is to download this image taken by NASA satellites and convert it into text. However, it'll work on any image; it doesn't even have to be a map.
Animation
ASCII-Globe also comes with code to generate animated GIFs from a list of frames. It uses a monospace font like most ASCII art to maintain text column alignment. The default behavior is to render white text on a transparent background, but the code comes with lots of parameters to customize the output.
Installation
If you want to use ASCII-Globe yourself, follow the installation instructions in the documentation.
Conclusion
ASCII-Globe was a delightful project to develop, and coding it taught me a lot about graphics programming. I hope you find it useful, or at least amusing.
~Ethan