🏎️ RunCar.dev

Welcome to RunCar.dev! A colorful, parallax-rich ASCII animation served entirely over HTTP — straight into your terminal. 🌐🎨🎮

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🚀 What is this?

RunCar.dev is a minimalist visual experiment that simulates a car driving down a road using ASCII art. Clouds, a glowing sun, distant mountains, alternating pine / round-leaf trees, lane markers and roadside rocks all scroll past at different speeds, giving a smooth parallax illusion — all inside your terminal. 🚗💨

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🛠️ How to Run It

No installation required! Simply open your terminal and run:

curl runcar.dev

⚠️ Make sure curl is installed. It's available by default on most Unix systems (Linux/macOS). On Windows, you can use Git Bash or WSL.

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✨ What You'll See

• 🎨 A fully colored ASCII scene with a layered, parallax-scrolling world
• ☁️ Sky: clouds and a 3-row sun with rays above and below
• ⛰️ Mountains: a distant gray range moving at half speed
• 🌲 Trees: alternating pine trees and round-leaf trees, four-row foliage
• 🚙 Car: chrome-white roof, bright-red body, gray tires — anchored at the center
• 🪨 Obstacles: sand-toned rocks (( ), oo, ()) zipping past the wheels
• 🛣️ Road: white edges and a bright-yellow == dashed centerline

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⚙️ Customizing the animation

You can tweak playback on a per-request basis with HTTP headers:

# Override frame interval (ms). Clamped to MIN_FRAME_INTERVAL_MS.
curl -H "X-Frame-Rate: 60" runcar.dev

# Disable ANSI colors for plain monochrome output.
curl -H "X-No-Color: 1" runcar.dev

Or, if you're running your own instance, configure it via environment variables:

Variable	Default	Purpose
FRAME_INTERVAL_MS	90	ms between frames
MIN_FRAME_INTERVAL_MS	30	floor for X-Frame-Rate
RUNCAR_COLORS	true	0/false/no/off disables colors
NO_COLOR	(unset)	Standard convention — any non-empty value disables colors
ANIMATION_WIDTH	64	columns used by the frame generator
ANIMATION_FRAMES	32	number of frames generated
PORT	3000	HTTP port

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🧰 Local development

# Install nothing — it's pure stdlib Node (ESM)
npm start                       # run the server on http://localhost:3000

# Rebuild the animation frames deterministically
npm run generate

The frames live in animations/car.txt and are built by scripts/generate-frames.js from a few small pattern strings. Pattern lengths are picked so every parallax layer loops seamlessly within ANIMATION_FRAMES.

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🤝 Contributing

We welcome your feedback, bug reports, and pull requests! Feel free to open an Issue or a Pull Request with your ideas.

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🧪 Demo Preview

You can visit the main page to get more details and see the animation in action: RunCar.dev

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🧡 Love It?

Support the project by starring ⭐ the repo or sharing it with your terminal-loving friends.

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