DIYDoom VS q2java

Don't sell yourself short, I imagine you could achieve a lot more than you think! It's just a case of breaking the problem down, simplifying accordingly and (probably the most difficult bit) finding the time to sit down and work on it. There are some DIY courses that could even be followed and mashed up to approximate a scriptable "3D" engine with a bit of creativity. You could familiarise yourself with building a simple compiler + VM for a little language by following "Crafting Interpreters" (https://craftinginterpreters.com). For the engine side of things someone recently posted this "DIY Doom" over @ https://github.com/amroibrahim/DIYDoom which looks like a bit of fun.

I mean it's a bit tougher to do it all completely from scratch, but I reckon most HNers could get quite a lot of the way there :)

see also a tutorial on writing a doom-compatible engine from scratch:

https://github.com/amroibrahim/DIYDoom

they also have a community forum, diyidtech, at https://discord.gg/a8n4Y2z

For reference, I want to convert this C++ code (https://github.com/amroibrahim/DIYDoom/tree/master/DIYDOOM/Notes001/notes)

see also: a series of posts (with accompanying code) on rewriting the doom engine from scratch:

https://github.com/amroibrahim/DIYDoom

I had a huge amount of fun back in those days messing with QuakeWorld and Quake2, learned a ton of stuff.

One project was embedding a Python2 interpeter in QuakeWorld, along with a QuakeC->Python translator. The translator and the resulting Deathmatch and CTF games are here: https://github.com/barryp/qwpython

The other was embedding a JavaVM in Quake2, and instead of trying to translate the C game logic, we recreated the whole thing from scratch in an object-oriented Java fashion: https://github.com/barryp/q2java

Thanks to Carmack for opening up those old engines, that was a real education.