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EpicRay

An open source Ja­va – yes, se­ri­ous – ray­cast­ing game en­gine, aban­doned, but you can find it on GitHub again. I love to op­ti­mize and Ja­va gave me a chal­lenge here. I fol­lowed a C tu­to­ri­al back then to get the ba­sic math down (which I was not com­fort­able with back then) and was al­so in­spired by a game by Notch.

I op­ti­mized the hell out of the en­gine which was able to dis­play a tile-map of tex­tured 3D CPU-ray­cast­ed blocks. Us­ing thread­ing and main­ly cod­ing tricks I got the thing from iirc some­thing low­er than 20 fps to over 120 fps. Which says noth­ing, be­cause I don’t re­mem­ber the specs of the Note­book it ran on… or the res­o­lu­tion… or any­thing.

It had an ed­i­tor though, in which you were able to build tile maps and add cus­tom tiles, with an or­tho­graph­ic vi­su­al­iza­tion of the tile etc. And I learnt what mip-maps are and how to gen­er­ate them, be­cause the ar­ti­facts were just too hor­ri­ble.

My broth­er back then was us­ing some very ba­sic ray cast­ing game en­gine to make as­tound­ing­ly cool lit­tle games and I hoped to build some­thing nicer for him, tai­lored to his needs. I must have got­ten caught up in pre­ma­ture op­ti­miza­tions…

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