Chronogamer

I don't think Wolf3D wasn't done with ray-casting. There's probably easier ways to map the 2D floorplan to the vertical texture drawing routine. DOOM might have used a variation of ray-casting since it didn't have a simple grid floorplan and also had height variations. Then again, I seem to recall something about a whack of stuff in the DOOM WAD being precalculations of some sort.

I don't think Wolf3D wasn't done with ray-casting.  There's probably easier ways to map the 2D floorplan to the vertical texture drawing routine.  DOOM might have used a variation of ray-casting since it didn't have a simple grid floorplan and also had height variations.  Then again, I seem to recall something about a whack of stuff in the DOOM WAD being precalculations of some sort.

 

Hmm, I was probably mis-remembering something from "Tricks of the Doom Programmers" or whatever that title was. I know it talked about raycasting and I thought that had something to do with the 2D/3D illusion of those early games. I thought they worked by compressing the verticle lines of a texture to different scales depending on how far they were from the viewer and that that distance was determined by sending out "rays" from the line of sight. Still, I'm working from a faulty memory of a book I read almost a decade ago. This all probably applied to Doom and not Wolf3D. I would trust your knowledge of this waaay before I would trust mine.

 

Anyway, thanks for pointing that out. Though, I'm sure you see that my main point was that my compulsion to keep playing earlier games in a series/genre/style is still alive and well, although in this example it might have been more appropriate to have retrogamed back to Ultima Underworld from Arena, and then from Ultima Underworld, I would have eventually gotten to Aklabeth and again end up staring at an Apple ][ emulator.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfenstein_3D_engine

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_engine

 

Interesting reading. :-)

 

I wonder if it was thanks to you that the Studio II and the APF M1000's carts were dumped. They can be easily found today, although I think a few Studio II carts are missing. I was going to write "who cares?", but I actually do care. It's a piece of gaming history, and these games should be easy to find.

On 11/18/2012 at 8:00 PM, Nelio said:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfenstein_3D_engine

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_engine

 

Interesting reading. ?

 

I wonder if it was thanks to you that the Studio II and the APF M1000's carts were dumped. They can be easily found today, although I think a few Studio II carts are missing. I was going to write "who cares?", but I actually do care. It's a piece of gaming history, and these games should be easy to find.

 

Hey, these links ARE interesting reading and I was glad to learn that the term I was trying to find was indeed ray casting (I had wondered if it was ray tracing, that's something else entirely and only 30 years after Wolfenstein are we seeing it in a real-time 3D game. (Minecraft RTX)

 

And, yes, despite my dislike of the RCA Studio II, it is part of history (Plus I really think its box and actual console design was pretty sweet looking. The way we used to think the future would look. "The way the future was" one could say.)