Raycaster Engine

This is a graphics engine which uses the raycasting method to draw the world.

The world is defined in a 2D matrix. Then, rays are cast from the player’s point of view, and the DDA (Digital Differential Analyzer) algorithm is used to intercept the cells and check for wall collissions, which then lets me draw the world line by line.

A similar method is used for rendering the floor and the ceiling.

The engine has no hardware acceleration at all. Everything is processed by the CPU. As such, your fans will spin very rapidly when this thing is running. It also will use all of your CPUs cores to speed up rendering, as it would be unbearably slow without it. So have fun with your new heater.

Features

• A fake 3D world drawn from a 2D matrix.
• Walls, ceiling and floors can have different textures, per tile.
• Use arbitrary textures, of any size. They’ll get squashed to a square shape.
• A tacked on dynamic lighting system with shadows and everything (one of the main reasons for the poor performance).
• Oh, did I mention poor performance?
• A somewhat working level editor (works in real time!) which even lets you save your levels!
• A crappy widget system which only has buttons, spinners, and labels.
• Two hand drawn textures, rest were stolen from various places, mostly Wolf3D.
• Look up/down and crouch/stretch your neck? In short, player has variable height.
• Angled walls, can be at any angle… ANY. That’s a lot of angles.
• A wonky skybox.
• Billboard style sprites.

Building

Simply run make. Do note that this engine makes use of pthread.h, which is Linux only. And as such, the engine is Linux only. Windows support would be trivial… but meh.

make

The executable will be in the build folder:

./build/main

Open it from the root of the project, as it depends on that path to find the levels and the textures. Speaking of… you won’t have any, since they are stored in Git LFS. So, install git lfs, then run:

git lfs install
git lfs pull

Controls

When you launch the engine you’ll be in the level editor.

Level Editor

• T: Toggle between editor and game.
• Left click: Place tile.
• Middle click: Pan the view.
• Right click: Delete tile.
• 1-9: Switch textures. Not all of them are accesible. Oh well.
• GUI controls on the bottom left. You can change the size of the map and change the layer you’re currently editing.
• When you click on save level the level will be saved on ./assets/maps/test.map. There’s no confirmation.

Game

• WASD: Move.
• T: Go into level editor.
• Ctrl: Crouch.
• Left Alt: Stetch neck.
• Left Shift: Run.
• Use mouse to look around.