New demo uploaded: Wolfenstein 3D - raycasting demo with textures

[Ed Minchau]

On 2/23/2022 at 10:08 AM, Rob said:

So, in short, unless you're using either a native resolution or a scaling factor of 2, you will end up with odd-sized pixels that won't look right unless those odd-sized pixels are more evenly dispersed.

I think I'd be okay with a border-less lower resolution option to experience an even smoother frame rate.



I got to this thread while thinking of a PETSCII Wolfenstein engine, so seeing this engine working on even 160 x 120 would still be glorious.

I was thinking of PETSCII Wolfenstein too.  With a custom character set, the whole display would just be 80x60x2 bytes per frame, so 9600 bytes.  If you went the "double PETSCII" mode using both layers, it's still only 19200 bytes.  The image might look a little blocky, but the blocks themselves might present enough detail to fool the eye.  At roughly 11 cycles per byte (I think that was @Jeffrey's estimate), that's 105600 to 211200 cycles per frame.  That brings 30fps within reach.

And if you go with half the resolution, it's 1/4 of the cycles.

[ZeroByte]

I've been thinking about spending some time away from Zsound and making an asembly version of the OPL->OPM music conversion routine so this program can have the background music playing.

I could just make the Zsound tool convert OPL and then output as ZSM and let the demo use Zsound to play the ZSM, but I think it'd be cooler if the demo were to actually use the original game files (so if it ever gets finished as a game engine, it could use real maps produced by the modding community)

I think a good way to do this would be instead of converting in real-time, convert the entire song at load time and store in memory as ZSM....

Is there currently any free space in banked ram for this, @Jeffrey?

[Jeffrey]

On 5/14/2022 at 6:56 AM, ZeroByte said:

I've been thinking about spending some time away from Zsound and making an asembly version of the OPL->OPM music conversion routine so this program can have the background music playing.



I could just make the Zsound tool convert OPL and then output as ZSM and let the demo use Zsound to play the ZSM, but I think it'd be cooler if the demo were to actually use the original game files (so if it ever gets finished as a game engine, it could use real maps produced by the modding community)



I think a good way to do this would be instead of converting in real-time, convert the entire song at load time and store in memory as ZSM....



Is there currently any free space in banked ram for this, @Jeffrey?

There might be. If I recall correctly Wolf3D on the X16 was contrained mainly on VRAM not banked ram (unlike the STNICCC demo). It of course depends on the amount needed. Are we taling a few tens of kb? Or more like a megabyte?

I would have to look at the code again to be sure though. Its been a while ?

[ZeroByte]

Most of the songs come in at under 30k if I recall correctly. The code base for my player takes around 2K right now, so assuming memory constraints aren't an issue, I might just tinker with it later.