.PLAN remake game: like WAY OUT

VIRAND

This is a picture grabbed from a dusty old VHS videotape of
a 3D game I made around 1983 on the ATARI 400
entirely in 6502 assembler, which I think would be a nice first project to port to
the HYDRA and thereby become much more familiar with the hardware:

mpark

For a second I thought that was Wayout.

Looks like a great project. Keep us posted!

JT Cook

Go for it, I think that would be a good Hydra project.

AndreL

Did you use raycasting? Or was it faked with multiple views like wizardy etc. ? Wayout was a ray caster for example.

Andre'

VIRAND

I couldn't find a definition of raycasting immediately.

What I did originally was algorithmically draw from the distance inward toward the screen
all the things in the field of view based on my coordinates and facing direction on the map,
which was mostly walls, using triangles and quadrilaterals. Things behind walls actually
got quickly drawn and then covered up, so I think it might not qualify as a raycaster, because ...
Doesn't it start drawing at the player's point of view and go outward until it hits something and then stop?

Shadow effects were relevant to extremely limited knowledge of nearby walls during rendering.
So limited, that if the maze was altered to have less walls, it would draw walls that it guessed
should be there. Turns were also not very smooth and you could never stop and look into a corner.

How is it known that WAY OUT used "raycasting", as like "virtual reality", the terms seem too recently invented.
Seems to me that Wolfenstein and DOOM came out in the early 1990's. I thought they are the first raycasters.

VIRAND

I'm not familiar with wizardry and couldn't find images like you mentioned.
How was it fake raycasting? Do you mean it had a set of predrawn images?

pharseid

· That would be depth sorting or the painter's algorithm. You sort items by distance from the viewpoint and draw them from the farthest to the nearest, so that a nearer item will obscure a more distant one that was drawn earlier. For a relatively small number of polygons, this will be faster then the z-buffer method because you don't have to check a z-buffer for each pixel drawn. As the number of polygons increases, at some point the worse than linear performance of sorting methods will fall behind the linear performance of the z-buffer method. Also, I would think it would be easier to come up with a balanced method of dividing up the problem on a processor like the Propellor with the z-buffer method. You could assign each processor a region of the screen or maybe even do just-in-time drawing with each processor drawing a scan-line ahead of time, but maybe only running a few scan lines ahead of video output.

-phar

VIRAND

UPDATE: Finally got a few days to study the propeller and start coding.
The code is not playable yet but only has fractal sound. I'll post it when it plays a little.
(The image is mostly an initial layout demo. I'll try to make a raycaster with fractal texture.)

VIRAND

PROGRESS UPDATE: (slow progress, that is.)
This is not playable yet but is a (self-)educational demo at this point, (my first Hydra game project)
which makes mazes and shows the internal view using my idea of a 'raycaster'.

The maze maker is pseudorandom, but the raycaster is experimental and can not yet move from it's current viewpoint.
It repeats the process of making mazes and rendering a view of them. There is some perspective distortion in the view.
My previous maze maker was very very slow, which is why there remains a "progress bar".

This has been taking much longer than I expected but only because of many distractions.

This requires the TV and GRAPHICS drivers included with the Hydra in "sources".

AndreL

Ray casting is very old, its simplified version of ray-tracing that instead of casting ray's from the viewpoint thru every pixel in the viewplane into the geometry, a ray caster casts a single ray from the viewpoint thru each column of the screen to the geometry which is usually a 2D height map. Then based on the Z distance to each collision you then scale the vertical slice and render slices to construct the complete 3D view. Ray casters can create all kinds of cool effects like glass, shadows, etc. I have written quite a bit on the subject, if you can find a copy of my original Tricks of the game programming gurus, it along with "gardens of imagination" are probably the best sources of ray casting technology in book form. Also, if you google for "voxel engines, andre lamothe" you should be able to find my voxel engine which is a variant that does both a vertical and horizontal ray cast to create a 3D landscape, many people used my algorithm published in game developer in the 90's as the basis for fast voxel engines, so you should be able to find it, this is good for terrain as well as useing a simplified height map z=0 for floor casting.

Anyway, way out was a ray caster based on technology from the 60's believe it or not. And the technology that doom was based on released in 1992-3 was 25-30 years old as well! The BSP tree which is the bread and butter of most software renderers and many collision engines was from a paper written by another graphics scientist in the 60's, although wikipedia list Schumacker as the first, I have read papers earlier with another creator, but I can't remember his name. But, suffice to say, everything you think is new is 20-50 years old!

I love ray casting and ray tracing, ironically people thing these are old technologies, but now with GPUs and fast processing people are re-visiting them since you can do real time ray tracing now and with ray tracing you get REAL shadows, real transparency, real everything. Polygons are SOOO messy. So in 7-8 years I predict that polygon rendering engines will be gone and all new graphics hardware will use ray tracing for rendering. The models will still be polygons and or higher order surfaces plus polygons, but the rendering algorithms purely ray tracing, since its so natural, and hidden surface removal, fog, etc. all happen naturally instead of hacks like we have to code now with polygons.

Andre'

VIRAND

Briefly, I think this qualifies as a raycaster, though flawed by curved rays, they do go through each pixel,
and transparency is possible. It draws vertical lines and if they (gr.line) are removed it draws the flat view
of the maze map. I think you gave me a hint on how to speed up the rendering which I'll try soon.

Where can I find your books? "Gardens of Imagination" sounds interesting, since I have tried to write a
'nature world' in the past.

I agree with what you say, I have a book from 1974 that describes computer graphics (Computer Lib/
Dream Machines) by Theodore Nelson, it seems a lot of stuff was reinvented on the 8-bits, then in
PC-DOS demoscene, and to many it all seems new again in Windows and maybe even on Hydra.

Ym2413a

I'd like to see this awesome program get done. [noparse]:)[/noparse]
I remember playing a few games like this as a kid.

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Oldbitcollector (Jeff)

Impressive!!! Keep Going!

OBC

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