Elysian Shadows

So I wrote a raycaster a while back (in April I think) and rediscovered it while digging through my unfinished projects.
I intend to turn it into an actual game at some point, but for now all you can do is walk around.

It's written in C++, and uses SDL for drawing and input.
The main thing still missing from the rendering engine is the ability to draw sprites.

Anyway, I thought I'd make a YouTube video of the raycaster in action and show it off.

So, here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYci8S1Mdsc

Oh, and since the video isn't the best quality, here's a screenshot:

thats really tight. What exactly is a "Raycaster"?

jaymonster138 wrote: What exactly is a "Raycaster"?

You stole the words out of my mouth.

Edit: I think he was demonstrating hidden surface removal, but since the surfaces were hidden to begin with you see no visual differences, only performance gain.

jaymonster138 wrote:What exactly is a "Raycaster"?

Ray Casting

Games that used it: Doom, Wolfenstein 3D, lots of others too.

Example of a very small ray caster in C with Allegro.

So does the program recognize which way you are looking and decides to build where your looking? or am I way off? Whats the point of tracing the rays?

Here you go:
'Doom' 3D Engine techniques. This explains it briefly.

This one is mentioned in the other link as having a much more detailed explanation of raycasters.
acksrc.zip

Note that he's using SDL for drawing. That's pretty damn badass. Very impressive, sir.

GyroVorbis wrote:Note that he's using SDL for drawing. That's pretty damn badass. Very impressive, sir.

Wtf.. how? Looks like OGL.

So basically it takes a 2D map, and like... makes it appear 3D?

XianForce wrote:So basically it takes a 2D map, and like... makes it appear 3D?

Exactly.
Just like this.

Maybe you guys should stop commenting like this if you don't know what it is. He's not using OpenGL or any pre-set 3d calculation, he's made a raycaster which draws the screen by the pixels, using "rays" to work out the size and texture splicing of the walls that the player can see. There's a good tutorial on it on Gamedev.net.

And yeah this is awesome, you should totally go for a full-on Doom style FPS game with this.

Gentlemen, don't you remember playing Doom 95 and Wolfenstein 3D on Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 before dedicated 3D cards were even invented?

Ever wondered how in the fuck Doom was ported to the Super Nintendo? Wonder no more.