Wolfenstein 3D Clone in C

Built this Wolfenstein 3D clone in pure C to understand how those early 90s games created 3D worlds before 3D acceleration existed. No OpenGL, no game engines, just C and math.

Under the Hood:

• Raycasting engine that tricks your brain into seeing 3D
• Textured walls that actually look decent from any angle
• Sprites for enemies that don’t break perspective
• Collision detection that prevents walking through walls
• Classic gameplay with shooting, health pickups, and ammo management

The core is an old-school raycasting loop - firing invisible rays from the player’s viewpoint and calculating wall distances. Getting the fish-eye correction right took longer than I care to admit.

Performance was a nightmare at first - went from 15 FPS to 60+ by switching to fixed-point math in critical sections and building lookup tables for sine/cosine values. Early 90s developers were wizards to make this run on 386 processors.

Sprite rendering is a quite a pain - sorting and scaling sprites correctly based on distance while keeping performance acceptable is surprisingly complex when you can’t just call a library function.

This project taught me more about practical graphics programming than any book could. Now I understand why Carmack was considered a genius - he did this and more without Stack Overflow or GitHub to reference.