leroycep / ascii-raycaster

A 3d raycaster that renders to ASCII text.

Ascii Raycaster

A 3d raycaster that renders to ASCII text.

Controls

• i and k to move forward and back
• j and l to look left and right
• o and u to look up and down

That's all.

Why render to ASCII?

Because it's cool.

In all seriousness, I decided to make this because my brother was playing around with raycasting. I stumbled across a roguelike thread debating the merits of tilesets vs ASCII, and one point was that ASCII was easily identifiable. The two ideas just collided in my head and here we are.

One side effect of using ASCII is that the number of "characters" that I have to raycast is significantly reduced. You would get the same effect with larger pixels, but when I add game objects that need to be discerned from each other, ASCII should let me use a lower resolution.

Future Plans

• Move to custom "grid-of-text" renderer

Links that I used

http://lodev.org/cgtutor/raycasting.html

http://9bitscience.blogspot.com/2013/07/raymarching-distance-fields_14.html

http://permadi.com/1996/05/ray-casting-tutorial-table-of-contents/

Wikipedia. Lots of wikipedia, on vectors, rotation, and matrices.

Voxel Quest

ascii-raycaster's Issues

Is Rust very hard to create raycaster like this?

Use Signed Distance Functions

Signed Distance Function allow you to create a renderable by composing functions together. These functions easy to parallelize on the GPU, because they are just a set of calculations to make, not a bunch of if-then rules.

• Implement a signed distance function shader
• Create algorithm that converts a minecraft-like world into SDFs
• Generate GLSL programs from the SDFs

Implement collision detection

Once proper collision detection is implemented, the player can jump around and stuff.