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