Show HN: TTF-DOOM – A raycaster running inside TrueType font hinting

26 pointsposted 7 hours ago
by 4RH1T3CT0R

4 Comments

tadfisher

4 hours ago

You are (or I suspect your LLM is) not correct about Doom using a raycasting engine. Wolfenstein fits that description, yes. Doom rather famously introduced BSP for level data and it draws sorted polygons front-to-back without ray-marching.

emanuele-em

6 hours ago

Ok the MUL workaround got me. MUL does (ab)/64 so you have to DIV first to get a64, then MUL finally gives you a*b. And recursive FDEFs because there's no WHILE? All in 6.5KB? What kind of frame rate do you actually get out of this?

4RH1T3CT0R

5 hours ago

Frame rate depends on the browser - Chrome gives around 30-60fps on my machine, but the bottleneck is actually Chrome deciding whether to re-run hinting at all (had to add axis jitter to force it). The TT bytecode itself executes fast, it's maybe a few thousand instructions per frame

  The recursive FDEF thing is the worst part honestly. Every while loop is a function that calls itself, and FreeType kills you at ~64 deep. So you're constantly juggling how many columns vs how many ray steps you can afford

tombert

4 hours ago

I tried playing the demo, and it was just green bars for me. The walls didn't scale up or shrink, it was just a bunch of solid static green bars.

The enemies did scale up and shrink as I got closer, and the minimap worked.

Tried with Brave on Linux, and Google Chrome on macOS.