The Matrix digital rain

THE MATRIX DIGITAL RAIN

12 JANUARY 2024

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“All I see is blonde, brunette, red head.” The iconic digital rain from The -Matrix in C, with zero dependencies—not even ncurses.

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Overview

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This is my fork of Domsson’s beautiful Fakesteak. While going through his code, I -wondered what it would take to faithfully recreate the original Matrix from the -first movie without sacrificing its minimalism.

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My implementation supports:

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Unicode characters.
24-bit RGB colors (truecolor).
Glitches in the matrix.
Ghosting effect of old monochrome CRT displays.
Closely resembles the Matrix seen in the background during Neo and Cypher’s -conversation.

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With no dependencies, compilation is trivial:

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$ cc -O3 main.c -o matrix
-$ ./matrix
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How does it work?

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The program tracks the state of the terminal, such as code points, background -and foreground colors, and cursor position, using multiple internal data -buffers. On each frame, it updates these buffers and repaints the screen using -ANSI escape codes:

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static void term_print(const matrix *mat, size_t row, size_t col)
-{
-    size_t idx;
-    idx = mat_idx(mat, row, col);
-    wprintf(L"\x1b[%d;%dH\x1b[38;2;%d;%d;%dm%lc",
-        row, col,
-        mat->rgb[idx].color[R],
-        mat->rgb[idx].color[G],
-        mat->rgb[idx].color[B],
-        mat->code[idx]);
-}
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The ghosting effect is achieved by carefully scaling the RGB -channels before mixing them:

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static void mat_shade(matrix *mat, size_t row, size_t col) 
-{
-    unsigned char *color;
-    color = mat->rgb[mat_idx(mat, row, col)].color;
-    color[R] = color[R] - (color[R] - COLOR_BG_RED) / 2;
-    color[G] = color[G] - (color[G] - COLOR_BG_GRN) / 2;
-    color[B] = color[B] - (color[B] - COLOR_BG_BLU) / 2;
-}
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The ghosting function emulates the dim after glow by gradually transitioning -each raindrop’s color towards the background color. This approach provides two -key benefits: straightforward color configuration that integrates naturally -with (Unix) ricing and high-fidelity recreation of the Matrix aesthetic.

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Customization

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While you can alter almost every aspect, including speed, glitch frequency, and -rain density, the most common customizations are the color scheme and character -set.

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There are three color settings: head, tail, and background. You can configure -them using COLOR_*_RED, COLOR_*_GRN, and COLOR_*_BLU definitions found in -main.c.

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The UNICODE_MIN and UNICODE_MAX values control the Unicode block used. For -example, setting them to 0x30A1 and 0x30F6 rains Katakana, if a font that -supports Katakana is present on the system:

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Files: source.tar.gz

by W. D. Sadeep Madurange