Hi all I am a complete rookie and this question is probably gonna confirm that beyond doubt! But it's been bugging me and I'm sure you all know the answer so here goes (please forgive the clumsy wording): I'm trying to code a simple raycasting game but can't seem to get it right. I have my grid-map set up and I cast the rays for wall boundaries, no problem. My rays return the perpendicular distance to any wall slices hit, no problem. My problem comes when I display the slices on the screen. The top of my walls to the side of the viewer don't appear straight, they start to curve. Now, I'm thinking that this makes sense since I'm using trig to calculate the distance to wall slices and trig functions are not linear. I have a couple of raycasting books and they don't seem to mention this. Am I missing something because I can't find anything on the web that mentions this? By the way, this has nothing to do with what they call the 'fisheye effect' as far as I can tell. The walls directly in front of the viewer are fine, it's just the walls to the left and right of the viewer. I can sense you all laughing at this question already (or am I just paranoid?!) since I've probably missed something basic, but please put me out of my misery as I can't see an easy solution apart from linear interpolating across a whole wall! many thanks for your time, jimi

I'm no ray-casting master but AFAIK yuo cast your rays, get the texture for that
wall slice and draw a vertical line with the length depending on the distance.
That's how I see raycasting.
So I'm not sure how you got your walls curved...

CableGuy

Thanks for replying.
It's the top of the walls that appear curved, not the individual vertical columns. Each column is vertical but the overall effect after displaying lots of them is that the top of the wall appears curved. I can see why this is but I don't know what to do about it.

Thanks
jimi

Hi avyne2001

Thanks for reply.
I think I understand the fisheye effect and I'm pretty certain that my problem is not that. The walls directly in front of the viewer appear fine. It's only the walls off to the left and right side of the viewer that appear distorted.

Thanks
jimi

Hendrix,

there is a decent tutorial at http://www.permadi.com/tutorial/raycast/index.html which will give you a better idea of how to implement a raycasting engine.

Virtual,

Yes, it is one of the best tutorials I've seen. However, it doesn't address the issue I'm talking about. When it comes to displaying the wall columns, this, as do all the others I've seen, skims over the process. I'll try and explain my problem more clearly.

|
|
|
| x

Let's say that my viewer is as marked x in the above and the line to the left of him is a wall. Now, I cast out rays from the viewer to the wall, using a FOV of 120 deg (-60 deg to 60 deg). Let's say one of the rays is as below (the ray is the sloped line):

|/
| /
| /
----/x

Now, the distance from the viewer to the point of interception of the ray and the wall is (ray length) * cos (ray angle). I now divide the actual wall height with this distance to get the height of the column I need to display on the screen. Okay, so far so good. I need to cast out 800 of these rays, as my screen resolution is 800x600. This means that, with my FOV of 120 deg, I start with an angle of -60 deg and increment the angle by 0.15 deg in a loop until it reaches +60 deg. My problem is this: the angle is going up in equal steps (0.15 deg), i.e. linear, but the cosine function isn't, it's a curve. This means that the distribution of wall slice heights is not linear, and that as the angle gets bigger, the distance to the wall gets proportionally even bigger. This, of course, is gradual to begin with but does become noticeable after about sweeping rays for 20 deg. As I said earlier, this makes sense to me and I was just wondering if I am missing something. I've read over a number of tutorials on the topic but can't seem to find anything that addresses this issue. Maybe it only appears ok for smaller resolutions? Maybe it's only okay for a smaller FOV? I don't know. It is not the fisheye effect, which I have read about a lot.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks for your time.

jimi

NineYearCycle

http://img3.freeimagehosting.net/image.php?0c1ba39539.jpg

The screenshot shows the wall to the left of the viewer and the wall in front. Notice the bottom and top of the wall to the left are curving slightly. This is my problem.

thanks
jimi

I ran into a problem like this too. In my code, once I computed a ray/wall intersection point, I contructed a displacement vector from the wall back to the player. Then I took the length of that vector and used it to compute the height of the wall.

That was not the correct way to do it - the relevant length is the projection of displacement vector onto the camera heading normal (which, for a single frame, is a fixed vector and not dependent upon the ray angle. Just the camera angle). When I used that distance to compute the height, the walls popped out with straight lines.

Maybe you have a similar problem... just something to try out.