wolfenstein_lite is a demo I made after getting inspired by Wolfenstein 3D's rendering technique. I referred to this cool guide whenever I got stuck.

The technique (ray-casting) allowed Wolfenstein to render a 3D world multiple times per second on insanely limited hardware. Watch this video for an overall idea about the technique and learn about a few interesting optimizations.

While the original devs (including the legendary John Carmack) optimized the hell out of W3D's code, same can't be said of my code. I focused on making things work.

Building

I'm planning on adding Windows and Linux binaries to the releases section on GitHub. Till that happens, you'll have to do the following:

1. Ensure you've cargo setup properly. cargo is Rust's package manager. It can be installed using rustup.
2. Do cargo run --release in the project's root directory.
3. This will kick-off the demo. Code will be compiled the first time you run that command. It will take some time.

Controls

WASD for movement. Left and right arrow keys for turning.

Customizing

Config.toml contains a bunch of configurable fields. Most of them are self-explanatory.

Textures

They're configurable via the tex field in Config.toml. You can use your own textures. The textures must be RGB (i.e not RGBA) PNGs.

Maps

Map files contain 2 things:

1. header containing space separated width and height
2. grid of characters (space means empty, hex-digit means a wall is present)

See this if you want an example.

The hex-digit tells which texture to use: it's the index of a texture in Config.toml's tex field. Use of hex limits the maximum number of textures to 16. But hey, constraints can spark creativity ;)

Storing maps separately from textures allows 'skinning' of maps.

Random Note

It really sucks that GitHub flavored markdown doesn't allow embedding videos. Videos look way better than lifeless screenshots in this particular case.