RayCaster

Tuesday, December 21, 2004
RayCaster Page Now Online

Now that this project is becoming interesting, I've decided to give it its own webpage. RayCaster is a retro 3D game engine I'm programming which works similar to the Wolfenstein 3D, Blake Stone, and Rise of the Triad engines. It will eventually play host to an entire game that I am designing from scratch, some details of which I may release here at a later date when more progress is made.

The RayCaster engine will also eventually become open source and will be released under the GNU General Public License, so that everyone can have maximum fun with it.

Why use ray casting? This is the first of my hopefully many retro game projects, and it is meant to capture a distinct "old school" atmosphere. At the same time, however, RayCaster will use some more modern techniques that could never have appeared in older ray casting engines. It will, for example, include distance fading in 32-bit color via the use of alpha blending, it will support maps of any size, it supports safe no-clipping and can never exceed the screen or world boundaries under any circumstance, and it supports changes in camera height and y-shear, allowing actions like crouching, flying, and looking up or down.

Copyright © 2004 James Haley - Best viewed at 800x600x16M.