In the last update i talked about 3 limitations with my raycaster that were hurting my ability to make good gameplay/levels!

Well I actually managed to fix two out of three in the last 3 days. Which is more then i expected!

if you recall the limitations were:

1. TRUE Two-sided walls
2. Sprite occlusion on edge casses,
3. Panoramic Skyboxes/floor/ceiling textures

My sprite occlusion is now pixel-perfect without any frame drops (which was the important part). 

And I've also got two-sided mid walls working now! That means proper connected fences and a bunch of other cooll stuff is now possible. I can even improve this further with better collision if I want, but that'll be more work.

So the only one missing now is:

1. Panoramic Skyboxes/floor/ceiling textures

i’m not super attached to that feature, so i’m skipping it for now. the flat but shaded/gradiented floor colors and frutiger-aero sky/cieling gradients already look cool and unique. it’d be easy to add, just… a mountain of painfully joyless code that also might hurt the framerate and i’d rather tackle small, hard problems than big annoying piles of “easy.” that drag on forever due to tiny bugs that also may or may not tank my frameate. Im not saying that will never be added.  Its on my trello, its important. Its just not fun. And i dont feel liek tackling it right now is all.

For those of you making your own raycaster. 

The way i accomplished, two sided walls in mine was, that when a wall is flagged as two sided, it pushes to a stack of "wall information" and then on the next iteration of my DDA  It immediately emits this wall segment (With the correct texture for the back side, etc) , and genrates the wall segment with a small epislon on its "perpendicular distance" , to avoid z-fighting and so that it renders just before the farther wall that may or may not exist. 

I didn't see anyone who had accxomplished this write about how they accomplished this specific part despite puoring over raycasting tutorials on monday, and I had to just coem up with my own soluition to this problem. 

Its very efficient since i already push all walls, it just adds a segment. Which is no different from just having a single additional wall somewhere.

Apparently the common solution is a full renderer rewrite so all walls are treated as "mid walls" and render on grid lines . I avoided that, just barely.

What's the plan now? 

First up: entity collisions.  Easy addition, it's literally at the top of my Trello. This will allow me to have wolfenstein style pillar sprites you cannot walk through.

Second up: I need to update my editor to include all the new features i added for zones. (A bunch of toggles and a way to set the shading) 

(And probably adding a way to change the sight distance on a per zone basis) 

Then, before the next release, I want to upgrade the maps:

Imagine: An atmospheric graveyard with a locked gate and fence in the village map (find the key to get in, maybe check out a crypt and do some grave robbing! Might be fun.).

 Hidden areas in the first map (The Manor) you can blast open with explosive barrels.

And A few more secrets and set-pieces sprinkled around. Basically, I'm finally feel free to just do some actual game dev. Instead of engine dev.

Its Worth It

i know it's been a while since the last update, but this one s worth the wait just imagine the screenshots :P