Freshly Squeezed Progress Report: Rendering Doors, Incorrectly

Last time, I reported how door rendering was trickier than anticipated for The Dungeon Under My House, my second Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project.

The tricks just kept coming.

Sprints 19 & 20: Pre-production and initialization

Planned and incomplete:

• Doors can be opened/closed

I’ll admit that I’m a bit frustrated. I’ve been working on rendering doors for way too long. Granted, in terms of actual hours, it is less than a week’s worth of full-time effort, but since I’m working on this project part-time, it has taken almost a month of effort according to the calendar on the wall.

Basically, I have doors rendering in the correct horizontal position, but vertically they seem to appear to be too close to the camera or too far, and while I am sure it has to do with a math error somewhere, I’m struggling to find that error.

When it came to drawing walls, I remember having a strange issue with how the walls were appearing until I figured out that I needed to truncate a value to an integer. Then suddenly a lot of things looked perfect.

And I suspect that there is something similar going on here.

I tinted the door and the entryway with a red color so it is easier to see how it doesn’t line up with the walls/floors, especially when seen at the edges of the view.

Even weirder is that if you turn to face a different direction, the doors seem to slide much closer to the camera before receding back to their only slightly wrong position.

Why can’t I just use the wall rendering code? That code is taking shortcuts, with the assumption that walls are aligned with grid edges. Calculating the distance a ray travels to a wall involves incrementally adding to a value until you know how far along the grid that ray has traveled.

In this case, a “thing” can be a line segment that does not align cleanly with the edges of a grid cell, and so calculating the distance is done more directly. If I calculate the distance to a door from the player’s position, I’ll get a fisheye effect. Weirdly, as my calculations take that into account by trying to find the perpendicular distance instead of the direct distance, I still get a fisheye effect, but it is less severe.

And it still doesn’t explain why the doors seem to move closer when turning, whether I am calculating the distance directly or not.

I’m sure I’ll figure it out, but it would be nice if I could do so more quickly.

Thanks for reading!

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