wolfgang ziegler


„make stuff and blog about it“

The Doom Fire Effect on a 32x32 RGB LED Panel

January 17, 2019

I am currently reading Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D by Fabien Sanglard and I can very much recommend it. Following the author on Twitter (@fabynou), I found his interesting tweet on the Doom Fire Effect.

In his blog post he explains in much detail how this nice little effect was done and how it can be implemented.

This effect seemed like a good addition to that 32x32 RGB LED matrix I have sitting in my home office which is rendering different kinds of animations (I blogged about quite some time ago).

The 32x32 RGB LED Matrix

As usual, when creating a new animation for this frame, I prototyped it with Javascript for my other project dashydash, where it also makes for a cool transition effect. I had to tweak the sample slightly to make it suitable for the very limiting 32x32 "pixel" matrix, but this makes for the charm of these animations.

Javascript version of the animation

After that, it was easy to port the code to the actual Arduino sketch driving the RGB matrix.

Animated GIF of the fire effect