P5JS makes it very easy to start playing around with.
Author here. P5JS is great and I've used it in the past. However you can get pretty far with just VanillaJS. Here's the source code to the ASCII Clouds tool, it's almost all plain JS.
https://github.com/caidanw/caidanw.github.io/blob/main/src/p...
So cool. Thanks for sharing the source! A few years back I made a p5.js ASCII Cloud sketch using the extended ASCII block chars.
For those curious what a stripped-down version of noise-based clouds would look like, it's only 50 lines of js: https://editor.p5js.org/stungeye/sketches/LPdeHgz9B
Re:ASCII Clouds
by evilturnip on Wednesday January 14, 2026 @09:14AM
(#46616293)
I think it's technically Simplex noise, but yes also developed by Perlin.
Author here, yes you are correct that it's Simplex noise. I also use a method of domain warping, I used this article as reference https://iquilezles.org/articles/warp/
It's such a fabulous tool as the generated images can be used for effects like glass/ice displacements, cheap water-like effects, but you can also generate terrains from it or just cool visual effects that benefit from random patterns. The core property to me is that it feels very organic/natural.
This was such a common tool in Flash AS3 back in the days to create stunning effects, games and such. I'm not active in building visual stuff like that anymore but I bet it's still very common in this field, because why not?