✅ miniRT Development Checklist

requirements for the 42 Singapore miniRT project

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📚 Useful Learning Resources

• Overview Article: Real-Time Ray Tracing Overview
• Video Series: NVIDIA’s Ray Tracing Essentials on YouTube
• Online Guidebook: Ray Tracing in One Weekend

🧱 1. Project Setup

• Project written in C, follows Norm.
• Create Makefile with these rules: all, clean, fclean, re, bonus.
• Use only allowed functions: open, close, read, write, printf, malloc, free, perror, strerror, exit.
• Link -lm for math.h and use MiniLibX.
• Add libft as subfolder and link properly.

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📄 2. .rt File Parsing

The program must read and parse a .rt file with the following requirements:

General:

• .rt file must be passed as a command-line argument.
• Parse file ignoring blank lines and handling multiple spaces.
• Accept any order of elements.
• Only 1 of each: Ambient (A), Camera (C), Light (L).
• Validate ranges and format strictly.

Required elements:

• Ambient light A ratio R,G,B
  e.g. A 0.2 255,255,255

  • Ratio [0.0, 1.0]
  • RGB [0-255]

• Camera C x,y,z orientation FOV
  e.g. C -50.0,0,20 0,0,1 70

  • FOV [0,180]
  • Orientation vector normalized [-1.0, 1.0]

• Light L x,y,z brightness R,G,B
  e.g. L -40,0,30 0.7 255,255,255

  • Brightness ratio [0.0, 1.0]

Object types:

• Sphere sp x,y,z diameter R,G,B
• Plane pl x,y,z normal R,G,B
• Cylinder cy x,y,z orientation diameter height R,G,B

Parser checks:

• Error on invalid/missing values
• Error on duplicate A, C, L
• Error message: Error\n + clear explanation

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💡 3. Rendering Logic

• Implement ray casting engine
• Intersect functions:
  • Sphere
  • Plane
  • Cylinder
• Compute:
  • Ambient light
  • Diffuse light
  • Hard shadow

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🎨 4. Image Display

• Set up window with MiniLibX
• Draw rendered image
• Handle:
  • ESC key to quit
  • Red cross to quit
• Make sure app is responsive

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🧹 5. Error Handling & Memory

• Exit cleanly on bad input
• Free all memory properly
• No memory leaks
• Handle null pointers, malloc fails

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🧪 6. Testing

• Add .rt test files to scenes/
• Test edge cases (e.g. zero FOV, bad RGB)
• Check performance/responsiveness
• Confirm Norm compliance

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✨ 7. Bonus Ideas (Optional)

Only add these after the mandatory part is 100% working.

• Phong specular reflection
• Checkerboard pattern
• Colored multi-lights
• New shapes (cone, paraboloid)
• Bump mapping
• Textures or skybox
• Mouse/camera movement

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📦 Repo Structure

miniRT/
├── src/
├── include/
├── scenes/
│   └── test_scene.rt
├── libft/
├── ft_gnl/
├── mlx/
├── Makefile
├── README.md