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Gabe1290 edited this page Aug 11, 2026 · 2 revisions

3D View (First-Person Raycast Rendering)

Home | Full Action Reference | Extensions

PyGameMaker can render a room as a Doom/Wolfenstein-style first-person 3D view instead of the usual top-down picture — walls as vertical strips, a textured or coloured floor and ceiling, an optional panning sky, and billboard sprites for pickups and monsters. The game logic (movement, collisions, events) is unchanged; only how the room is drawn changes.

This is provided by the built-in 2.5D Raycast extension, which ships enabled. It exports to all three targets — desktop, HTML5, and Kivy/Android — so a first-person game runs the same everywhere.

The bundled samples raycast_1–raycast_4 are complete, playable examples (a plain maze, a two-level game with pickups and a monster, a health/medkit variant, and a DOOM-style status-bar showcase).

How it works

  • A room becomes first-person when an object runs the Enable Raycast View action (usually in its Create event). That object is the camera by default — its position is the viewpoint and its facing_angle is the look direction.
  • Walls are your solid instances. The renderer derives thin wall edges from every solid object in the room, on a grid whose size is the action's cell_size (32 by default — the size every maze_*/raycast_* sample uses). A wall-sprited solid textures the wall; otherwise a flat wall_color is used.
  • The camera turns by changing facing_angle (see Set Facing Angle), and moves with the ordinary movement actions (e.g. set_direction_speed with direction = "facing_angle" to walk forward).
  • Non-solid sprited instances (goals, pickups, monsters) draw as camera-facing billboards, correctly occluded by walls.

The actions (category 3D View)

Action What it does
Enable Raycast View (enable_raycast_view) Switch the current room to (or from) the first-person view, and configure the camera: camera_object, fov, render_distance, cell_size, wall/floor/ceiling colours and textures, an optional sky_texture, and viewport_height (a DOOM-bar letterbox).
Set Facing Angle (set_facing_angle) Turn the camera. Angle in GameMaker degrees (0 = right, 90 = up); relative adds to the current facing.
Draw Minimap (draw_minimap) Draw a north-up minimap of the room's walls with a "you are here" marker. A HUD action — put it in a Draw event.
Draw DOOM HUD (draw_doom_hud) Draw a DOOM-style bottom status bar: health bar + number, a health-reactive face, score, lives, and an objective counter. Pairs with enable_raycast_view's viewport_height.

See the Full Action Reference for every parameter.

A minimal first-person controller

In the player object:

  • Create: Enable Raycast View (leave camera_object empty so the player is the camera).
  • Keyboard Left / Right: Set Facing Angle with relative on (e.g. ±3°).
  • Keyboard Up: Set Direction Speed with direction = facing_angle and a small speed to walk forward.

Build the room out of solid wall objects on a 32-pixel grid, exactly like the maze_* samples — the raycaster turns those walls into the 3D corridors.

Notes and limits

  • The HUD actions (draw_minimap, draw_doom_hud, and the ordinary draw_score / draw_lives / draw_text) composite on top of the first-person frame, in screen space.
  • Walls are static for the first-person pass — walls created/destroyed after the room loads don't reshape the 3D geometry.
  • If the 2.5D Raycast extension is disabled, a room that enables the view simply renders top-down and the IDE warns you on load — see Extensions.

See Also

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