2.5D, world’s smallest cube?

I remember when Wolfenstein came out, and was suddenly shooting night after night Nazi’s in Castle Wolfenstein. Graphics paling in comparison with today’s pixelpushing standards, but very addictive when it came to Gameplay. iD Software created a whole new market by distributing the game as shareware and it has sold over 250.000 copies of it.

As said, graphics were very pixelated, but the game would run fine on a 286 ( a 486 was top of the line ) and sound was awful ( but then again, what would you expect from 8bit soundcards ). The breakthrough was that this was the first game in the first person shooter genre. The game itself wasn’t really 3D, but it gave you the illusion you were really playing B.J. Blazkowicz, captured and trying to escape from Castle Wolfenstein. It was more 2.5D, since bullets were fired straight ahead with no illusion of depth. In fact there was no up and down at all, so that meant you could not jump or crawl. All items in the game would be displayed ‘en face’ no matter where you stood, so although it looked like 3D, it was not.

Now that’s all nice and all, but what does that have to do with this post? Recently i was challenged by several members of a dutch DHTML community to come up with the smallest version of a spinning 3D cube. Ofcourse, i couldn’t resist this challenge so i started working on a version and posting it to their online forum. For a couple of days it we posted our versions, 1,5k, 1,2k, 1k, 900bytes and so on. Finally they managed it to get it down to 598 bytes. I knew my reputation was at stake, so i had to make a smaller version. Leaving out the Z-axis would chop off some more bytes. So hold and below, my version came down to 555 bytes!

Thanks to Flasm, Peter Hall and Casper Schuirink for their help! Ofcourse, if you manage to find a way to get rid of some more bytes, please let me know, always interested.

Below is the code and the Flash file.

FAIL (the browser should render some flash content, not this).

Actionscript code:

k=l=m=n=0;
j=[];
i=8;
while (i--) {
	j[i] = [(i & 1)*100-50, (i >> 1 & 1)*100-50, (i >> 1 >> 1 & 1)*100-50];
        attachMovie('d', i, i);
}
onEnterFrame = function() {
        m += k=d ? (_ymouse-h)/2 : k*.99;
        n += l=d ? (g-_xmouse)/2 : l*.99;
        g = _xmouse;
        h = _ymouse;
        i = 8;
        while (i--) {
                C = j[i][2]*Math.cos(n*.017453)-j[i][0]*Math.sin(n*.017453);
                D = 200/(j[i][1]*Math.sin(m*.017453)+C*Math.cos(m*.017453)+200);
                with(eval(i)) {
                        _x = 200+D*(j[i][2]*Math.sin(n*.017453)+j[i][0]*Math.cos(n*.017453));
                        _y = 200+D*(j[i][1]*Math.cos(m*.017453)-C*Math.sin(m*.017453));
                        _width = _height=D*6.65+1;
                        }
                }
};
onMouseDown = onMouseUp = function() {
    d = !d;
};

Download the Flash source ( *.FLA, 28k )