Lumorti / asciiGL

An ASCII 3D engine for Fortran

asciiGL

asciiGL is a lightweight Fortran library allowing the rendering of 3D objects in the terminal using only text.

Features

• simple commands to create/transform objects
• multiple camera control options such as linear WASD movement or an orbiting camera
• can load and render stl files
• efficient, since Fortran is very good at processing vectors/matrices
• supports different colours and characters for the edge/fill of each object

Dependencies

This requires ncurses, a c library used to draw text to the terminal. Fortran bindings are included as the files "macros.c" and "ncurses.f90", both written by John S. Urban and in the public domain.

To install ncurses on Ubuntu:

sudo apt install libncurses5-dev

To install on Windows using MinGW you need to install PDCurses, which can either be done manually or using MinGW-get.

Compiling

A makefile is included along with an example, simply enter the src directory and type:

make

in the directory and the run the resulting program with:

./a.out

On Windows you'll need to use "mingw32-make.exe" and "./a.exe" instead.

Example Code (example.f90)

program example

    use asciiGL

    character :: userInput
    integer :: chairObject

    ! Initialise the screen
    call start()

    ! Set up the camera and allows the user to orbit using the arrows and zoom using w/s
    call set_interactivity("fly")
    call set_camera_pos((/ 0.05, 4.85, 1.7 /))
    call set_camera_rot((/ -0.30, 0.0, 0.05 /))

    ! Add a chair model, saving the ID into chairObject
    chairObject = add_stl("chair.stl", pos=(/ 0.0, 8.0, 0.7 /), scale=(/ 0.3, 0.3, 0.3 /), fillChar=" ")

    do

        ! Render the 3D scene and draw to the screen
        call render()
        call draw()

        ! Get the user's key press (will also process inputs like wasd if enabled)
        call get_input(userInput)

        ! Rotate the chair
        call rotate_object(chairObject, (/ 0.0, 0.0, 0.03 /))

    end do

end program

Documentation

Full function documentation available here