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Comment by lcswi | Hacker News Reader

Hm, that's hardly anything like doom. It is more like a very basic raycasting engine from several years before that. Doom in 9800 would be really impressive. This does not seem very special if you ever wrote your own engine like that.

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They wrote a raycasting engine in 9800 lines of assembly, running on a Pi, using Doom's textures. Is it Doom? No, but it's pretty darn impressive. Avoid gratuitous negativity.

'avoid gratuitous negativity' is a thought we all need to keep in mind more.

It's actually a rule of the site,

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I think it should be a rule for real-life. I've found the less negative my thoughts, the better my general outlook on life.

it's not raycasting though

Right, it does not seem to be a raycasting algorithm, and the author mentions of it in the youtube comments that it's a "rasterization" meaning perspective projection of textured polygons.

Actually I'm the author, so yeah, that's right

Which is why they should have advertised something like that. This is related to Doom only in that the music and textures are the same. I'll forgive a little negativity if it comes from someone correcting a dishonestly titled article/submission.

I doubt the music was played by the device, most probably it was dubbed in post processing.

What is gratuitous about what I said?

Just because it wasn't Doom doesn't mean it's without merit. This is a first year University project, written in small amount of assembly, with no supporting OS.

I never questioned that

You implied it was a trivial achievement. Perhaps that wasn't your intention, perhaps you had intended to encourage, but if that's the case it wasn't obvious.

Looks like they have part of what made Doom unique (at the time)-- they've got height differences and non-perpendicular walls, but don't quite have the same lighting and texture mapping capability that Doom had.

And the demo doesn't show whether or not they have Doom's dynamic capabilities (that let level builders make things like moving elevators).

This looks like it's probably somewhere between Wolfenstein 3D and Doom in terms of engine features.

As a first-year University assembly project in 4 weeks, I'd be a bit more hesitant to judge.

From the comments:

  OP's project isn't a simple port. They wrote an original DOOM-like engine, 
  from scratch, in assembly language. It only looks like 
  DOOM because they're using DOOM textures.

It's a common misconception, but Doom uses a BSP-tree based renderer, not raycasting.

This is their first year project...

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