Glyphloop MCP server

Glyphloop

A browser studio and headless toolkit for creating loop-perfect generative ASCII animations: flow fields, wave interference, morphing noise blobs, matrix rain, rotating 3D shapes, custom math expressions, and parametric surfaces. Layer effects over images, video, or text, inherit their colors, and export to PNG, GIF, MP4, self-contained web embeds, or terminal players.

Also usable headless by AI agents through the package CLI or MCP server - agents can even define their own animations and 3D shapes as expression strings. See AGENTS.md.

Glyphloop = glyphs + seamless loops.

Try the hosted studio with no account, or see live examples.

Local Studio

npm ci
npm run dev        # opens on http://localhost:5199

Node.js 20 or newer is required. Chrome is recommended because MP4 export uses WebCodecs; the other workflows work in modern browsers.

CLI and MCP

The package exposes one glyphloop executable with two commands:

npx glyphloop@beta render --preset flowfield-hero --out hero
npx glyphloop@beta mcp

From a source checkout, the equivalent development commands are:

npm run render -- --preset flowfield-hero --out hero
npm run mcp

render accepts a built-in preset name, a preset JSON file, or inline JSON. Run node bin/glyphloop.js --help for the complete command summary.

Use

any image/video onto the editor** to ASCII-fy your own design with its colors intact.

1. Pick an effect source and tweak its parameters live - or **drag & drop

two-color gradient.

1. Style it: character ramp (or type your own), gamma, invert, mono or

starts at its native aspect ratio, and raster exports can match its exact pixel dimensions.

1. Set grid columns, cell size, aspect ratio, duration, and FPS. Imported media

1. Export:

frame-by-frame (never drops frames). Generated motion wraps seamlessly.

• PNG - current frame, at 1–3× scale.
• GIF / MP4 - one animation pass, rendered deterministically

player.js (tiny dependency-free player, honors prefers-reduced-motion) + a demo index.html. Drop the two files into any site and add .

• Web embed (zip) - frames.json (RLE-compressed character frames) +

the animation in a terminal.

• Terminal (zip) - frames.ans + play.sh; run bash play.sh to loop

The editor includes six starter presets. Presets can also be saved to localStorage or downloaded/loaded as JSON via the header bar. A shared preset can be opened with /studio/?preset=flowfield-hero.

Imported media stays in the browser; Glyphloop does not upload it. For a stable beta experience, images are limited to 25 MiB and 40 decoded megapixels, videos to 100 MiB and the first 20 seconds, and preset files to 10 MiB. Very large render workloads are rejected with guidance to reduce scale, columns, FPS, or duration.

The hosted website and Studio send a small allowlisted set of anonymous product events to a first-party Cloudflare endpoint. Creative inputs and outputs are never included. Source checkouts, the CLI, and the MCP server send no analytics. See the hosted privacy notice.

Source color vs image palette

These are two different ways to color imported media:

glyph keeps the local color beneath it. It preserves multicolor artwork and follows changing video colors frame by frame.

• Color mode: source samples the image or video at every grid cell, so each

fills the Ink, Ink 2, and Paper controls. Choose mono or gradient to render with those curated colors instead of retaining every source color.

• Set ink & paper from image extracts a small representative palette and

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.