Wolfenstein in 600 Lines of Code

What’s more impressive, the fact that this Wolfenstein-like game is 600 lines of code, or that it’s written in AWK?

AWK is a language primarily used for text processing. But if you can write code the world bows to your wishes. [Fedor Kalugin] leverages the ability of a Linux terminal’s color options to draw his game. The 3D aspect is produced through ray-casting which generates a 2D image from 3D coordinates.

Trying out the game is extremely simple, install gawk, clone the repo, and play:

sudo apt-get install gawk
git clone https://github.com/TheMozg/awk-raycaster.git
cd awk-raycaster/
gawk -f awkaster.awk

We really appreciate the four different display modes which illustrate doing a lot with very little. They include: black and white text, color text, color background, and combination of color text and background. It’s an advanced texture technique with which every ansi artist is familiar.

Don’t limit yourself to playing with the script and losing interest. Crack that thing open. Try making a spinning wireframe cube based on this framework!

[via HackerNews]