shithub: wl3d

ref: 306bd81b628115bc2167ae40793b1c45365195ee
dir: /RELEASE/

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We are releasing this code for the entertainment of the 
user community.  We don't guarentee that anything even 
builds in here.  Projects just seem to rot when you leave 
them alone for long periods of time.

This is all the source we have relating to the original 
PC wolfenstein 3D project.  We haven't looked at this 
stuff in years, and I would probably be horribly embarassed 
to dig through my old code, so please don't ask any questions 
about it. The original project was built in borland c++ 3.0.  
I think some minor changes were required for later versions.

You will need the data from a released version of wolf or spear 
to use the exe built from this code.  You can just use a 
shareware version if you are really cheap.


Some coding comments in retrospect:

The ray casting refresh architecture is still reasonably 
appropriate for the game.  A BSP based texture mapper could 
go faster, but ray casting was a lot simpler to do at the time.

The dynamically compiled scaling routines are now a Bad Thing.  
On uncached machines (the original target) they are the fastest 
possible way to scale walls, but on modern processors you just 
wind up thrashing the code cash and wrecking performance.  
A simple looping texture mapper would be faster on 486+ machines.

The whole page manager caching scheme is unecessarily complex.

Way too many #ifdefs in the code!


Some project ideas with this code:

Add new monsters or weapons.

Add taller walls and vertical motion.   This should only be 
done if the texture mapper is rewritten.

Convert to a 32 bit compiler.  This would be a fair amount 
of work, but I would hate to even mess with crusty old 16 
bit code.  The code would get a LOT smaller.

Make a multi-player game that runs on DOOM sersetup / ipxsetup drivers.


Have fun...

John Carmack
Technical Director
Id Software