Minecraft on Your Terminal – Minecraftty

A terminal-based 3D voxel renderer inspired by Minecraft, written in Rust using wgpu for GPU-accelerated rendering.

• 3D Voxel Rendering: Real-time 3D block world rendering in your terminal
• GPU Acceleration: Uses wgpu for hardware-accelerated graphics
• Terminal Graphics: Renders using Unicode block characters (▀) with 24-bit color
• Texture Support: Loads and displays block textures from PNG files
• Camera Controls: WASD movement with mouse-look style controls
• Cross-Platform: Works on macOS, Linux, and Windows
• High Resolution: 2x supersampling for crisp visuals in terminal

• WASD or Arrow Keys: Move around
• Q/E: Move up/down
• H/L: Look left/right
• J/K: Look up/down
• X or Esc: Exit

• Rust (latest stable)
• Vulkan/Metal/DirectX compatible graphics drivers
• A terminal with 24-bit color support

MinecraftTTY uses a unique approach to render 3D graphics in the terminal:

1. GPU Rendering: Uses wgpu to render the 3D scene to an off-screen texture
2. Pixel Sampling: Reads the rendered pixels back from the GPU
3. Terminal Mapping: Maps pairs of pixels to Unicode "▀" characters
4. Color Encoding: Uses ANSI 24-bit color codes for accurate color reproduction

Each terminal character represents 2 vertical pixels:

• Foreground color: Bottom pixel
• Background color: Top pixel
• Character: "▀" (upper half block)

This technique allows for surprisingly detailed 3D graphics in a text terminal.

• Renderer: wgpu (WebGPU implementation)
• Math: glam for linear algebra
• Noise: Perlin noise for terrain generation
• Terminal: crossterm for cross-platform terminal control
• Textures: PNG texture atlas support

The renderer targets 30 FPS and automatically scales to your terminal size. For best performance:

• Use a GPU with Vulkan/Metal/DirectX support
• Ensure your terminal supports 24-bit color
• Consider reducing terminal size for better frame rates

This project is inspired by and builds upon the work of zacoons/minecraftty, originally written in Zig. This Rust implementation adds:

• Texture support with PNG loading
• Improved terminal rendering with synchronized updates
• Enhanced camera controls
• Cross-platform compatibility improvements
• Higher resolution rendering with pixel averaging

• Original Concept: zacoons for the original MinecraftTTY in Zig
• Inspiration: The work shown in this YouTube video
• Rust Implementation: Enhanced and ported to Rust with additional features