TrueType Font Contains 3D Raycasting Engine in Hinting Virtual Machine
By
4RH1T3CT0R
Crisp on the outside, thoughtful on the inside. A keeper.
Summary
A developer created a DOOM-style 3D raycasting engine that runs inside a TrueType font's hinting virtual machine. The project exploits the Turing-complete nature of TrueType's hinting bytecode to implement a DDA raycasting engine that renders 3D graphics by repositioning glyph contours. The font file contains the entire raycasting engine written in TrueType bytecode, with the glyph 'A' using 16 vertical bar contours that are repositioned to form a 3D perspective view of a 16x16 tile map.
Key quotes
· 4 pulledTrueType fonts have a built-in virtual machine for grid-fitting glyphs. It's got a stack, storage slots, arithmetic, conditionals, function calls - and it turns out it's Turing-complete.
I wanted to see if I could get it to render 3D graphics.
The font file contains a DDA raycasting engine written in TrueType bytecode.
The glyph 'A' has 16 vertical bar contours, and the hinting program raycasts against a 16x16 tile map and repositions those bars using SCFS instructions to form a 3D perspective view.
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