Thanks for all the feedback. =)
I’ve uploaded a new version with some additional tile types, mouse look support (since it’s an applet, I can’t recenter the mouse, though…), and a sky in the woods!
I’m going to keep the ceiling that close to the head, though, as I’m trying to make the game feel like a mix between Dungeon Master, Eye of the Beholder, and Ultima Underworld
gouessej:
Neat!
- who work on this project (full name)?
Markus Persson, under the alias Mojang Specifications
- what are the technologies involved in the project? Which API? Which engine? Which algorithms for rendering (hardware, software: raycasting, raytracing…) ?
It uses 100% pure java. I’m going for a definite retro feeling (see the screenshots above), so the game is designed for 320x240 pixels, plus it really helps the framerate.
The rendering:
The floor is a rotozoomer, with some really slow perspective math. It’s fast enough, though. 
The walls, like in Doom, heavily abuse the fact that they’re always aligned to the screen in the y-axis. To get perspective long x, I interpolate over 1/z (which is linear in screen space, yay), and over u*z, which also happens to be linear in screen space.
Sprites are basically just scaled images checked against the zbuffer.
So far, the only thing written to any buffers has been color information, z depth information, and a brightness value per pixel. This brightness is only used for shading walls, and might get optimized away in the future.
When everything has been written, I iterate over the entire screen, calculating true distance based on the z depth information, multiply that by the brightness and the color, then write that to the pixel buffer. I do things this way to avoid having to do the fairly heavy lighting math for each pixel, reducing overdraw, and to keep all the lighting math in a single place.
Walls closest to the player gets rendered first, and there’s NO overdraw and NO z-buffer checking at all when rendering walls, thanks to some seriously heavy culling.
Sprites, however, cause quite a bit of overdraw.
- what is the category of the game?
It’s a Role Playing Game, meant to feel something like a mix between ultima underworld, eye of the beholder, and dungeon master/dungeon master 2, except possibly a bit more modern.
- what is the story?
I haven’t come up with a non-embarrassing story, yet. Probably something about fetching something important, hehe.
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