A Walk In A Metro Tunnel
A downloadable walk for Windows and Linux
Experience the thrill of walking roughly two kilometers of metro tunnel while reading some commentary, and appreciating how the world disintegrates around you.
This walking simulator was written in C and GLSL using Raylib. The UI elements aside, the game's graphics are all ray marched.
Controls
- WASD or IJKL to move
- Mouse or arrow keys to look around
- Q to auto-walk (toggles whether or not you walk forward continuously, like holding W or I)
- Shift to toggle between run and walk
Why?
I feel like I need to explain why this exists. This game went through three decisions based on technical limits, in all parts of the game development process:
- The idea phase. I wanted to make a game where the graphics were done via ray marching.
- The planning phase. I like the metro, and metro tunnels are, in a very simplified light, just a tunnel with a railtrack. Which is simple enough of a scene to model with the tools you have when ray marching.
- The coding phase. OpenGL floating-point numbers turned out to not be accurate enough (at least with my naive implementation of ray marching), so everything is very noisy.
And that's how you get a game where you walk in a metro tunnel to appreciate how weird technical details can visualize in cool ways.
macOS support
This game does not support macOS, because Apple has deprecated OpenGL, and has poor driver support. More details in the Git repository.
License and source code
This game is distributed under the GNU GPLv3 license, and you can find the source on my Git, or by downloading the metro-source.zip file provided in the downloads below. See the readme for build instructions.
Download
Install instructions
Extract the whole zip into a folder, and launch the executable file.
If the game complains that files are missing, ensure that the metro_assets folder is in the same folder as the executable file.
Comments
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I'm wondering why it doesn't look noisy at all for me. Only seems like the resoultion is a bit low but it looks crispy clear compared to the screenshots here ^^"
It isn't very noisy at the start! The last half of the tunnel should be much noisier. Of course, considering that the whole noisiness is a bug-turned-feature caused by the technicalities of floating-point numbers, it does depend on your hardware as well. I would be surprised if there was any hardware for which the entire tunnel is non-noisy, though.
That was weird as hell. The tracks looked like bread at this point! At one point the noise was so random it made the walls and floor widen. Walking into this noisy blob would put barf on my screen.
I didn’t have any love to show to railways. Now I hug them anytime I see some.
Cool concept! I love to read the story while using the automatic walking. It’s kinda soothing and you get to know something about Helsinki and railways which are two things I never thought about and that’s pretty cool.
I’ll be waiting for “A walk in a metro train” continuation.
i get a eror when runing th ame ARNING: [GLFW3 Error] Code: 65543 Decription: GLX: Failed to create context: GLXBadFBConfig WARNING: GLFW Failed to initialize Window metro: /home/arydev/Downloads/metro-source/vendor/raylib/external/glfw/src/window.c:504: glfwSetWindowIcon: Assertion `window != NULL’ failed. Aborted (core dumped)
Try updating your graphics drivers. If that doesn't work, I'm afraid the game won't run on your computer.
My guess for what causes that error is insufficient OpenGL support in either your drivers or hardware. This game should theoretically run on any version newer than OpenGL 2.1, but there might be graphics card / driver specific issues which I unfortunately can't do much about.
i have opengl 2.1
Well, looking at the error, there's not much I can do to help. Something about your OS (drivers, window manager, the X window system) just does not work with GLFW.
it won't launch
What's your operating system, and are there any errors? If you're on Windows, SmartScreen or some other virus-protection program might be blocking it, in which case I'd recommend unblocking metro.exe in said anti-virus program.
I don't have any antivirus, besides the program freezes upon launch; implying something maybe wrong with the exe file itself.
Hard to say what's wrong with the game on your system based on this, sorry.