Maze

Some of the information that was here is in the process of being moved off to the Maze Help page. It's the page you should get when you punch maze's "Help" button. This page will contain everything that doesn't seem to fit there.

Version 1.2.2, April 14, 2000

The Maze plug-in draws mazes in the GIMP (0.99). Features include a choice of maze styles (Prim's Algorithm or depth-first), tileable mazes, and non-rectangular shaped mazes.

What's New in 1.2.x:

• 1.2.2: Fixes a long standing bug in Prim's algorithm. Also reworks the dialog for less complexity, and updates to use libgimp 1.1 widgetry.
• 1.2.1: Bugfixes for shaped mazes on offset layers. This was a very strange fix... x offset and y offset apparently have different solutions. (get_row now has +xoff, while get_col has no +yoff. Explain that, please!)
• Bugfix for non-interactive. Corrected the nparams check, corrected the order of the parameters. The status return codes mean very little right now, that run() function should be re-done in the future.
• 1.2.0:Made mask_maze actually work, by getting rows and columns at a time instead of tiles.
• Rewrote the help page with a man page type organization and a gimp.org-like style-sheet.
• Split up the code into a few more different files. algorithm.c contains the generation algorithms, handy.c contains plug-in functions that are non maze-specific.
• Added Prim's Algorithm in normal and tileable modes.
• Added algorithm choice to the PDB parameters.
  Note this changed the PDB interface.
• Added mask_maze, which allows mazes to be drawn in irregular selections.

Notes:

If the width doesn't divide evenly into the selection, dead space may be left around the edges. For non-tileable mazes, the "pieces" selectors will only choose values where the width of this extra dead space is no greater than that of a passage. (If you really want to change that, change the value of BORDER_TOLERANCE in maze_face.c and recompile.)

There's the dialog. I'll admit, the interface doesn't seem to be the most straightforward. ("What? You click on the left-arrow and the slider directly above it goes to the right?") I'm taking suggestions for new label names and/or ways to lay it out...

Current bugs:

• On gray and indexed images, it doesn't use the current fore/background colors... It defaults to black & white (or colors 0 and 15). This is in function get_colors(). If any of you indexed-image fans want to fix that function, I'd appreciate the help.
• If you switch to a larger passage size, leaving more dead space along the bottom, things may show up there on the next maze generation... It tends to go away in subsequent renderings. I guess something's not getting flushed, but I haven't tracked that down yet.

In the future?

• Re-write the run() function so the return status codes actually mean something.
• Re-write the drawing routine to draw walls and rooms differently. (This could also be made as a post-execution script.)
• The interface code still needs cleaning up.

ChangeLog:

• 0.6.2: drawbox has been rewritten with memcpy and a row buffer. By the way, Maze is now faster than checkerboard.
• Added a Help button which looks for extension_web_browser (part of the gimp distribution as of 0.99.19) and tells it to load this page.
• Added a DIVBOX_LOOKS_LIKE_SPINBUTTON option to maze.h. A goal is to make those arrow buttons look and behave more like gtk's spinbuttons. However, we're Not There Yet and this option is set to FALSE by default.
• 0.6.1: The "Time" button (for random seed, see below) is now a toggle button that remembers its setting. Moves the random seed stuff to the second notebook page.
• 0.6.0: Allows for seperate passage width and height entries. Script authors beware: This changed the PDB interface.
• Added the "pieces" selectors, allowing you to choose a width (or height) based on how many divisions that will split the maze in to. The arrows on those guys are semi-intellegent and will only choose reasonable, workable values based on the selection size and if it's a tileable maze or not.
• Added a "Time" button for selection of random seed. In 0.6.0, this is a push-button that simply feeds a value to the "Seed" entry, but it will become a toggle-button in the very near future.
• Took out seed=time(); on "Run with last vals" and added a "timeseed" member to stored values, to go with aforementioned toggle button.
• Oh yeah. Code has been split in to maze.h, maze_face.c (code for dialog, including everything relevant to the "pieces" selectors (we call 'em divboxes)), and maze.c (query, run, maze generation, and drawing routines). So maze now ships in a tarball with a Makefile.

Maze 0.5.0 includes an option to make mazes "tileable"... (Check out the page background.) You tell me if you can still trace a solution through 'em. Unfortunately the user must be very careful to use a passage width that is evenly divisible into the drawable size, or else undesirable things happen.

Maze 0.4.2 includes a patch from Adrian Likins to make non-interactive mode work more properly with his circuit.scm script. The non-interactive mode isn't something I test rigorously, so feedback is especially appreciated.

Maze 0.4.1 properly handles colors in grayscale images, and compiles nice and clean without warnings using gcc -Wall.

Maze 0.4.0 looks and feels just like 0.3.0, but a fair chunk of the code was rewritten and it's a bit more efficient.

Credits:

• mazegen() is from maz.c in the Maze FAQ, found at The X2 MS-DOS Programming Archive. (Note that's really a FTP link...)
• I've quoted liberally from other GIMP plug-ins, including plasma, pixelize, and checkerboard... Thanks guys.
• Other than that, plug-in is by me, Kevin Turner <acapnotic@users.sourceforge.net>
• Also thanks to the folks on #gimp for putting up with me and answering my questions.
• With a big "for they are jolly good fellows" to S&P and all the other GIMP developers...
• What they hey, to Linus & Linux developers as well. Drinks for everybody.

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