raycasting

💡 Overview

This project is a showcase of the classic Wolfenstein 3D raycasting technique built in C.
It traces rays through a 2D map to determine wall heights and colors, creating a pseudo-3D view.
The engine uses a Digital Differential Analyzer (DDA) approach to step through the map grid, detect wall hits, and compute distances.

Note

This is a rewrite of my raycasting-rs Rust version. You can find the repository here.

Inspiration

• YouTube video by jdh
• Blogpost by Lode.

📦 Prerequisites

• C Compiler: GCC or Clang
• Make: for building
• SDL2: core library, development headers and libraries
• SDL2_image: for loading PNG/JPG textures
• SDL2_ttf: for rendering fonts

Installing SDL2

macOS

Homebrew example:

$ brew install sdl2 sdl2_image sdl2_ttf

Linux

Ubuntu/Debian example:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install libsdl2-dev libsdl2-image-dev libsdl2-ttf-dev

Fedora example:

$ sudo dnf install SDL2-devel SDL2_image-devel SDL2_ttf-devel

Arch example:

$ sudo pacman -S sdl2 sdl2_image sdl2_ttf

🎨 Assets Setup

Important

Assets like textures (under textures/...) and the font file (under fonts/...) are git‑ignored due to licensing. You must provide your own in order to run the application:

1. Textures: Create a textures/ directory in the repo root, then add subfolders matching the paths in your tiles.txt. Example:

raycasting/
├── textures/
│   ├── wall/walltexture1.png
│   ├── floor/floortile1.png
│   └── ...

2. Font: Place your TTF font file in fonts/ and update FONT_PATH in main.c if the name differs.

Failure to supply these assets will cause the engine to print an error and exit on startup.

🗂️ Tile Manifest

The TILE_MANIFEST (tiles.txt) maps hex IDs to texture files and tile types:

0x01 textures/wall/walltexture1.png     wall
0x40 textures/floor/floortile1.png      floor
0x60 textures/door/door_lg.png          door
0x70 textures/light/light.png           decor

• Hex ID: used in map.txt to specify which tile to draw.
• Path: relative path to the texture file.
• Type: one of wall, floor, door, or decor.

The engine reads this file at startup and builds a lookup table for fast tile access.

Note

Update MAX_TILE_ID in main.c if your total tile count exceeds 255 (0xFF).

🗺️ Map Format

map.txt begins with the map dimensions, followed by rows of hex IDs:

10 10
01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01
01 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 01
01 40 40 60 40 40 70 70 40 01
...

• The first line: <width> <height>
• Each subsequent value: a two‑digit hex code (from tiles.txt).

🚀 Building and Running

1. Clone the repository:

$ git clone https://github.com/adrior11/raycasting.git
$ cd raycasting

2. Build and Run the application:

$ make
$ ./raycasting

Optionally, generate compile_commands.json for IDEs and code-indexing tools:

$ bear -- make

🎮 Controls

• W / S: Move forward / backward
• A / D: Strafe left / right
• ← / →: Rotate camera
• ESC: Quit the application

License

This project is available under the MIT License.