cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/34900257

A modern Doom engine written from the ground up with a focus on performance.

Content creators have created maps that struggle to render at high framerates with even the latest and most expensive hardware. With Helion, Doom's most complex maps are no longer stressful on modern GPUs and playable on old hardware that was previously impossible.

Helion uses static rendering with a state management system to reconcile dynamic map changes in Doom. In contrast to the typical BSP tree rendering that requires significant CPU processing, Helion is able to manage dynamic changes and optimally utilize the GPU resulting in dramatic performance increases.

Helion supports WADs targeting vanilla, Boom, MBF, MBF21, UDMF (partial support), and ID24.

Minimum requirements are Windows 7 or Linux and an Open GL 3.3 capable GPU.

This is a project I've been working on for the last couple of years (on and off - some work in early 2022, the rest in 2023). It's a hyper-casual game - pick a mystery image, and fill in the numbered squares with their matching colors. If you've seen something like Cross Stitch World on mobile devices, you get the idea.

DamPBN was created for PCs running MS-DOS with a 386 or higher, and uses VGA mode 13h for a full 256 colors (though images themselves are limited to a palette of 64 colors). The development environment is based on a much older version of DJGPP (using GCC 2.8), though it builds and runs fine on recent (GCC 9.x-based) DJGPP releases as well. I do all development in Visual Studio Code (because DOS-era text editors aren't very good) and build/test mainly in DOSBox-X, with occasional tests in 86Box and real hardware.

I also have a repo containing a number of other DOS related projects (https://github.com/Damaniel/dos_games), some of which I'll highlight in the future.