I really wanted to explore raycasting and some of the math behind it. So, I created this raycasting sandbox to experiment with it. On the left half of the screen, I have a top-down 2D view of the map with rays being casted from the player. On the right half, I implemented a 3D view of the scene using the euclidean distances I got from raycasting. The euclidean distances returned are converted to perpendicular distances with a bit of trignometry to get a less distorted image of the 3D space.

Movement is relative to the 2D top down view. To move around in the demo, use the WASD keys or the arrow keys. To rotate clockwise, use the F key or the Space key. To rotate counter-clockwise, use the G key.

Please install Golang 1.21 or higher. After doing so, either do go run main.go or go build main.go && ./main. The latter compiles the code into an executable and runs it. Note the above instructions should work on most MacOS and Linux machines.

Using this much trignometry was quite fun, but it would have been easier to implement the caster with less of it it. To calculate the distance, we really only need to know how much the length of the ray increases whenever one of the components increases by 1. We can use this fact by determining which side the intersection occurs on, and, then, use the corresponding component. This might help reduce floating point errors.