Wolfenstein 3D engine

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The Wolfenstein 3D engine is the engine that powers Wolfenstein 3D. The biggest part of the engine is programmed by John Carmack. It is written in C and ASM, and is almost a real complete engine. It features graphics (raycasting), sound (WAV and IMF), player physics and game control. Many enthusiasts are trying to improve the engine since the code was released.

1 Games
2 Info
3 The engine
4 Raycasting
5 Links

[edit] Games

Wolfenstein 3D was the first game that used this engine, and some other games followed:

Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold
Blake Stone: Planet Strike
Operation Body Count
Corridor 7
Super 3D Noah's Ark (which is not made by iD)
Rise of the Triad (slightly based on the engine)

[edit] Info

The game is 2.5D which means you see it though first person but it's not all 3D.

sprites used for enemies
you can't look up and down
textured walls
the whole level is at the same brightness
the whole level is a at the same level (eg. no staircases)

[edit] The engine

The engine consists of 53 source files written in C and ASM. Most of the game is managed by 17 WL_*.C files. They are listed below.

WL_ACT1.C - it manages actors
WL_ACT2.C - this one too
WL_AGENT.C - this file, the favorite of many ones, is used to manage game variables
WL_ASM.C - used to enable ASM commands and to bind the ASM files to the C files
WL_DEBUG.C - the engine comes with a debugger, and this file contains most of it
WL_DEF.H - in this file most of the extern variabeles and void's are stored
WL_DR_A.ASM - ?
WL_GAME.ASM - used to handle the game itself, loading and saving and some other stuff

This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

[edit] Raycasting

Raycasting is the main technique used in Wolf3D. Raycasting is similar to raytracing, but differs in a few points. With the raycasting technique, only the line of sight is calculated from the 'eye' of the player to the pixel in case. Raytracing uses another technique, which enables for instance shadowing, reflections and refractions. Since raycasting only uses one line of sight, shadowing or reflecting is impossible.