ndoom

An experiment in seeing how far a shell script can be pushed: a Wolfenstein-style raycaster written entirely in zsh, doing its trigonometry through bc -l and rendering the result as ASCII art in the terminal.

ndoom.sh casts 91 rays across a fixed 8x8 hardcoded map, walking each one out step by step and writing its hit distance to a plain file called distances. render.sh reads that file back and draws one ASCII frame from it — closer walls as #, a floor tint below a height line, and blank sky above it. It's a single-frame renderer rather than a live game: the loop that would tie the two scripts together into an actual playable frame-by-frame walk is written but commented out in ndoom.sh, so right now it's run as two separate steps by hand.

Mostly just curious to see whether shell arithmetic and bc could stand in for the floating-point trig a raycaster needs — turns out yes, just very, very slowly.

Running

./ndoom.sh      # casts rays, writes ./distances
./render.sh     # reads ./distances, draws one ASCII frame

Needs zsh and bc.