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Wolfenstein 3d map maze12/2/2023 ![]() The result can be seen here, as Wolf3D doesn't supports mods or external maps easily, I decided to reverse-engineer NMap's (an unnofficial mapping tool). I loved reading it, mostly because Wolf3D was one of the first PC games that actually made me start enjoying my father's 386DX instead of only my beloved AMIGA 500, and while it wouldn't be until 1994 that I started learning to code and grasped VGA graphics programming and assembly, I love the amount of tiny but interesting details that I've learned, from how a digital joystick worked and would be read its inputs, to why there were different sound formats or how clever were the guys at id storing the sprites to speed up even their reading and writing with VGA planar modes.Ī great technical and nostalgic walkthrough the source code of a game that changed everything, but also a reading about how at the early 90s and the old MS-DOS days everything was harder, from playing videogames (with the conventional memory limitations) to developing them (way harder than being able to play them :) NotesĪs I was reading a book about generating computer mazes I read the book announcement and couldn't resist to try to adapt the maze generators to export Wolfenstein 3D maps. It feels short but is +300 pages long, and also contains appendices and sequels & ports chapters to learn miscellaneous things related with the game. But to give a general overview, it is a quite specific technical book: You get history about 90s hardware (the 80386, VGA graphic cards, sound systems and the dreaded MS-DOS RAM handling), some background about the team and who did what regarding Wolf3D, but then it is a dive into the source code, analyzing, explaining and commenting the most relevant parts of the game internals, from how the raycaster works to how the sprites were stored, the different subsystems (sound, input, memory, cache. You can actually grasp the contents of the book not only by reading the whole author's blog, but with certain examples, like how the fizzlefade effect was built or how to understand floating point. I've been following Fabien's blog for many years, with his excellent videogame source code reviews and in general great articles, so when he announced he was finishing a book about Wolfenstein 3D I got so excited and actually preordered it (on Google Play/Android, read from a 9" tablet). In the first alcove to your left is a secret wall, hiding a chaingun.Title: Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D Inside is a room with several alcoves occupied by guards. In the room beyond open the door to you right. Open the door on the northern arm of the swastika. On the left side of the alcove with the second last barrel is a couple of secrets that will allow you to pick up the goodies.Ĥ. In the room beyond are some officers and some barrels blocking your way to lots of dinners and ammo clips. Go down the southern arm of the swastika and open the door in the bottom. The first secret is mandatory: it's the wall that is in front of you at the start.Ģ-3. This is the final trap of the floor: you're free to continue your journey towards the showdown with Adolf Hitler.ġ. Open one of the doors in the room behind the gold doors: you'll see a long hallway with lots of barrels and two silver doors in the bottom. When you open them, you'll alert several enemies, and the barrels will prevent you from retreating back fast. The final part of the map is rather difficult. Open one of them and kill the enemies inside. You'll eventually come to four gold doors. Grab it, come back to the previous room and open the other door. In one of them is the gold key (and this one is guarded too). Opening the one on your right you'll come to a hallway with many doors. Carefully kill the guards and manage your way to a pair of doors, both leading to a room with officers and two doors. In the new room, open the door in front of you, then pass through two empty rooms. Obtaining the gold key is a longer process: open the door in the northern arm of the swastika. Both the keys are mandatory to finish the level: the silver one is in a room accessed through a door in the western arm (it's guarded by officers). The starting room exits to a swastika-shaped hallway, with enemies and a door in each of the "arms". In order to exit your starting chamber, you have to press on a mandatory secret wall.
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