EDIT: Just to let you know, there’s a vastly updated version of this available!

This was on the old incarnation of Coldcity and was quite popular, so here it is again - sick and twisted realtime raytracing on the console Read on for binary and full source.

It was late, I was bored; so I married a heavily stripped-down version of aRT, my raytracer to a little text-mode rendering library I knocked up.

The equivalent video resolution when “rendering” to the console is 80 x 25 - which is handy as aRT, written for clarity and experimentation not speed, was able to do realtime speeds without any performance optimizations.

The result - “tart” (text-mode aRT). It runs on Win 2000/XP/Vista on the command line, and does about 24fps on my development machine.

Included in the download is the final version and full source code (VC++ 6, should be easily updatable to recent versions). Also included is full source and a demo of the ASCII rendering lib, which can take a bitmap, convert it to console characters and draw it (using the WriteConsoleOutput() system call for performance). It can do other pretty stuff besides raytracing:

renders as:

renders as:

Enjoy, and please feel free to use the text-mode rendering lib for anything you wish.

Download (44Kb Zip file)