DOOMHouse

DISCLAIMER

This repository is ~95% generated using Kilo Code with Gemini 3.0 Pro Preview, Gemini 3.0 Flash Preview, Opus 4.5 and ChatGPT 5.2.

Blogpost:

DOOMHouse: 3D game render engine in pure ClickHouse SQL

Description

DOOMHouse is an experimental "Doom-like" 3D game rendering engine that offloads all the rendering logic entirely to a ClickHouse database.

This project serves multiple purposes:

• As a playground for exeprimenting with agentic coding, using frontier models to solve highly complex and non-trivial tasks.
• As a proof-of-concept, demonstrating that modern analytical databases like ClickHouse are powerful enough to handle complex, non-traditional computational tasks — specifically real-time 3D graphics generation.
• As a fun way to learn about and experiment with advanced ClickHouse concepts.

The core graphics logic — including collision detection, raycasting, texture mapping, and shading — is executed via SQL queries, while a lightweight Python client handles user input and displays the resulting frames.

Screen recording

Themes

The engine supports different visual styles through SQL-based rendering logic. Examples:

Theme 1	Theme 2

Prerequisites

• Python 3.11 or later
• ClickHouse Server 26.1.1.562 or later (Local or Remote)

Installation

OBS: Due to an issue with some newer versions of ClickHouse this program only supports ClickHosue version 26.1.1.562 or later.

1. Install ClickHouse Server Locally

If you don't have ClickHouse installed, you can run it easily using Docker or install it directly on your system.

Using Docker (might be slower than native installation)

docker run -d --name clickhouse-server -p 8123:8123 -p 9000:9000 --ulimit nofile=262144:262144 clickhouse/clickhouse-server

Native Installation (macOS/Linux)

For macOS (using Homebrew):

brew install clickhouse
brew services start clickhouse

For macOS or Linux:

curl https://clickhouse.com/ | sh
./clickhouse server

2. Install Python Dependencies

Install the required libraries using pip:

pip install -r requirements.txt

The project depends on:

• clickhouse-connect: Database connector
• Pillow: Image processing and texture loading
• python-dotenv: Environment variable management

Configuration

If you already have a ClickHouse server running or need to change the default connection settings, modify the .env file in the project root:

CLICKHOUSE_HOST=localhost
CLICKHOUSE_PORT=8123
CLICKHOUSE_USER=default
CLICKHOUSE_PASS=

to the specifc connection settings needed to connect to the server.

Running the Application

1. Ensure your ClickHouse server is running.
2. Run the main Python script:

   python src/DOOMHouse.py

Controls

Key	Action
↑ / W	Move Forward
↓ / S	Move Backward
← / A	Rotate Left
→ / D	Rotate Right
T	Switch theme
Esc	Exit

Acknowledgments

This project is amongst other inspired by:

• DoomQL: Rendering Doom in a Database
• DuckDB-Doom: Rendering Doom in DuckDB
• Announcing adsb.exposed - Interactive Visualization and Analytics on ADS-B Flight Data with ClickHouse
• Writing a retro 3D FPS engine from scratch