VoxelSpace VS Portal-Raycaster

This uses the "Voxel Space algorithm" used in 1992s Comanche to get a faux 3d terrain. Based on the code from here with some optimizations to get a reasonable FPS.

Reminds me of this: https://github.com/s-macke/VoxelSpace

Another implementation to play around with here; this one's not DOS but web based though.

I'm reminded of the render algorithm in Comanche, the 1992 video game [0]. I find it remarkably ingenious, and it certainly felt incredible at the time.

[0] https://github.com/s-macke/VoxelSpace

The heightmap I've been manipulating may also be familiar to you, but not for the same reason, because it's terrain data of Mt. Fuji. I'm thinking of heightmap files instead of infinite noise, mixing the perks of ray-based rendering insights with a manageable early-'90s-style aesthetic and conventional level design. An erosion simulation could be preprocessed with a seamless OOB margin in that context too.

I wrote a voxel space implementation in Rust some time ago using SFML, and now am trying to move it to WGPU in order to learn how GPUs work better and perhaps solve a horizontal lines glitch I've got.

Recently, I’ve been getting into voxel rendering, and I’ve been thinking of a way of extending the voxel space algorithm. https://github.com/s-macke/VoxelSpace

Nice writeup! Building raycasting engines is fun and rewarding. You can get a lot of visual impact with very small and easy to understand code. I took a stab at it and ended up adding portals which I thought was really fun (https://github.com/gh123man/Portal-Raycaster).

I've been thinking about re-writing my raycasting engine in Rust but never really found the time - glad to see someone has done it and documented it so well!

If anyone else is interested in raycasting this page is also worth a read: https://lodev.org/cgtutor/raycasting.html

Ray casting is close to my heart as it's easy to understand and has a very high "effort to reward" ratio, especially to someone who is new to graphics programming. I built a game + engine around ray casting portals [1] (think the game Portal). It was a lot of fun trying to figure out how to bounce rays around a scene and intersect with different objects in the environment and immensely satisfying to have built the whole engine from the ground up. Though I'd probably not do it again. Your top-down ray debug view is very similar to one I came up with!

Some of the interesting bits of the engine are open source: https://github.com/gh123man/Portal-Raycaster

1. https://blog.sb1.io/gateescape/

If you find this sort of thing interesting, I implemented a "Portal" raycasting engine akin to Valves portal game. You can read more about how it works here: https://github.com/gh123man/Portal-Raycaster