Wolfenstein 3D on the VB

i am nowhere near as good in coding to port wolfenstein to the vb, but i have been wondering how hard it would be to write something similar from scratch. so, after seeing your post this morning, i printed out a raycasting tutorial and read it on my way home from university. (for anyone who doesn’t know, a raycaster is the kind of pseudo 3d engine early fps like wolfenstein used.) i was actually surprised about how easy the concept is, only requiring some cheap geometry. i can imagine a very basic engine being written in a day, and definitely want to give it a try when i find the time. 🙂

pat, what technique did you use to draw the columns to the screen? directly drawing the lines to the framebuffer seems to be the easiest way to me, i think i even saw a function to draw a line between two input points in one of your source codes. if i want to use wall textures, though, another approach is needed. i’d say objects, because we can’t have 384 individual bgmaps and there’s no way to draw single pixels to one (or do we?), but affine transformation can’t be used on an object.

Yeah, I just did everything by drawing directly to the framebuffers. Luckily since a raycaster works by drawing vertical lines, this is VERY efficient on the VB because vertical lines are consecutive bits/addresses in the framebuffer. And for textures, I’d suggest just adding it into the direct screen drawing code to look up what texture it’s drawing and set the proper bits in the framebuffer at draw time.

You may actually be able to trick Affine into creating the textures for you, and then moving them out of the framebuffer before they actually get displayed. This would let the hardware do the texture scaling, and all you’d have to do is copy the framebuffer from that location to the correct place in the framebuffer… but that’d probably be a little more complex and take some tricky coding.

DogP