Antonino Calderone

At its core, WinRayCast uses a classic raycasting pipeline: the world is a 2D grid map, and each screen column is rendered by casting a ray, detecting wall intersections, and drawing the correct textured wall slice. This creates a convincing pseudo-3D environment without polygons, meshes, or a full 3D renderer.

On top of this, I am building FPS mechanics and tools that turn WinRayCast into a small retro game-generator, where classic FPS-style games can be assembled from reusable data and assets: maps, textures, sprites, enemies, weapons, doors, keys, pickups, triggers, scripted behaviours, and simple game rules.

WinRayCast: a Retro Pseudo-3D FPS Engine and Game Generator

WinRayCast is a retro-style pseudo-3D engine inspired by early 1990s first-person shooters such as Wolfenstein 3D. It uses the classic raycasting technique to render a 2D map from a first-person perspective, creating the illusion of a 3D world without relying on a full polygonal rendering pipeline.

The project dates back to the 1990s, when I wrote the first version for MS-DOS in C/C++ and Intel 386 assembly, at a time when performance, memory access, and optimized inner loops were critical. Raycasting was ideal for that hardware generation, offering a convincing 3D-like experience with limited resources.

The approach became interesting again with the arrival of early mobile devices: although they were not well suited to GPU-heavy 3D engines, many had enough CPU power and RAM to run optimized pseudo-3D renderers similar to those used in 1990s games.

WinRayCast was later recreated as a programming tutorial for Computer Programming, a well-known Italian magazine from the 1990s and 2000s. The engine and its ideas were described in a 2007 article about pseudo-3D engines based on the raycasting algorithm used by classic FPS games.

The goal of WinRayCast is not to be a modern 3D engine, but to explore old-school game programming: fast rendering, grid-based levels, textured walls, sprites, simple visual effects, and the distinctive style of early FPS games.

WinRayCast is part of a broader interest in retro programming: studying how older engines worked, recreating their techniques, and making them accessible through modern tools. The engine is intentionally simple, readable, and educational, so that programmers can understand how pseudo-3D rendering, maps, and gameplay systems work from the inside.

Beyond being a single-game engine, WinRayCast is evolving into a small retro FPS game-generator, where different games can be built by changing data, assets, and rules. It is meant for experiments, prototypes, educational demos, and nostalgic indie-style projects, celebrating an era when clever algorithms and simple resources could create an entire 3D-like world.

As part of the project, I also developed a dedicated world editor, written in C#, designed to create and modify the digital worlds used by the engine. The editor allows the user to define maps, sprite properties, objects, interactions, and the behaviour of elements within the game world. These definitions are exported as a set of JSON files, together with external resources such as images, textures, sprites, sound effects, and other game assets. This makes the engine more than a standalone renderer: it becomes a small content-driven environment where different FPS-style games can be generated by changing data and resources rather than rewriting the engine itself.

A simplified version of the WinRayCast engine was also integrated into the Windows version of the nuBASIC interpreter, bringing pseudo-3D raycasting capabilities into a retro-programming language environment. This integration makes it possible to experiment with FPS-style rendering and game logic directly from nuBASIC, combining the educational spirit of BASIC programming with the visual impact of a classic raycasting engine.

WinrayCast Editor for Windows

Other (vintage) Projects

tVPN — VPN-focused project for peer-to-peer or site-to-site secure private networks over the internet.
tinyHTTPServer — Lightweight, cross-platform, multi-threaded web server written in modern C++, suitable for simple hosting and embedded scenarios.
nuTFTPServer — MIT-licensed TFTP server compliant with RFC 783, designed for reliable Trivial File Transfer Protocol services.
spiDyBoot — Utility for creating and modifying SPI bootable images for Freescale PowerPC SPI/flash-based devices.
nuTetris — Modern C++ Tetris clone, also ported to Java and C#, with a fully functional nuBASIC version.
Vintage software collection — Small archive of vintage public-domain software for anyone interested in earlier eras of computing.

See also GitHub: https://github.com/eantcal

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