Consider a 2d grid of tiles, and an approximated sphere of coordinates - centered on the player - that represents line of sight. The goal is to block the line of sight beyond obstacles (ie walls).
It's relatively simple to determine if an individual cell in the sphere of sight is visible: cast a ray from the player to the target cell, using Bresenham's - if one of the overlapping cells between the player and the target is an obstacle, the target cell is not visible.
Now, my first thought was to iterate through all grid cells in the line of sight - but this seems inefficient to me. For example, if the player is standing next to a wall, and you determine that the cell beyond the wall isn't visible, you can determine all cells on the ray after that won't be visible.
Also considered casting a ray to each cell along the perimeter of the sphere of sight, and iterating each cell along each ray - but then I'd be processing some cells more than once.
Is there a more efficient way to do this?
While iterating ~50 cells per turn is a relatively lightweight calculation, I'm going for speed - the goal is to be able to cycle a few turns per second on auto-play. So, the more efficient I can make this, the better.
