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Problem Description
Here's a Maze Generator program that's kind of
fun. You can generate, solve, and save mazes of varying sizes and
shapes. A set of letter shaped mazes is provided that can be concatenated
(strung together) to make a "name-maze" of your favorite
person.
Some more advanced code too.
Background & Techniques
This is a fairly large program, probably 2,000 lines of
code. A thorough discussion would fill a book, so I'll just hit
the high spots here.
A TMaze class in a separate U_TMaze unit contains the logic for most
maze operations. MakeImage procedure generates a random path
through the maze from Startpoint to Endpoint, making sure
that it doesn't double back on itself. Then MakeFalsePaths is
called to open up additional walls by generating paths starting at right angles
to the solutions path. Again each path must remain independent of other
paths, i.e. never knock down that last wall connecting two paths.
Optionally, MakeOpenRooms can be called to remove at least one wall of any remaining
closed rooms, just to make finding the solution a little more
difficult. The TMaze mouse routines (Mmousedown, Mmousemove,
and Mmouseup), allow the user to click and/or drag the solution
path. Surprisingly, these were the hardest to debug. The
trick is to size the program window and the code window so that they don't
overlap. This allows stepping through code and observing the onscreen
results without the debugger getting in the way.
Design mode allows the user to generate mazes of
any size or shape. Clicking on rooms in design mode toggles between normal
and "border" rooms. Right-click triggers a pop-up menu
which provides other control options. You can also shift-left click
to invert a rectangular range of rooms from the previous clicked to the current.
TFileStream objects are used to save and reload
generated mazes. At reload time, mazes can be concatenated to
the current maze. A set of "letter" mazes is available for
download which can be used to make word or name mazes. Kids love
them. By the way, the letter maze files have the "read
only" attribute set, to avoid accidentally modifying them.
Maze also serves as an example of using Printer class and TCanvas Copyrect and Strecthdraw
procedures to implement print preview and print operations.
Margins can be set and header and footer text added to printed mazes.
Mazes can be scaled to fit on a single page or span several pages.
Addendum March 22, 2008: The changes today are primarily
for programmers who want to recompile Maze. Version 1 used
registered versions of my numeric edit components TIntEdit and TFloatEdit
to get numeric data from the user for cell size, board size and print margins. Since these are visual components,
they had to be installed before use which is not good for long lived projects. You can learn more
here about my
replacements which are created at program startup time and avoid the
problem of losing components when operating system, computer, or Delphi
versions. Version 2 has uses the new versions. As usual a few minor
bugs found and corrected while testing the changes.
Running/Exploring the Program
Suggestions for Further Explorations
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I've
considered generalizing the code to make
6-sided (hexagonal) rooms. I think the problems are pretty much
mechanical, no new logical problems to solve. Which of course makes the
project less appealing. |
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Other
future program features include:
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1) the ability to close rooms, as well as
open them. I would modify MakeOpenRooms procedure to keep track of
walls removed so that another button could replace them. Currently
un-checking the" make open rooms" checkbox only takes effect
when the maze is regenerated. |
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2) An init file to automatically
save customized option settings ( maze and room sizes, colors, etc.), and restore them
at startup time. |
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3)
There's room in the panel at the left of the main form for a Tmemo
to contain some extended help or hints, one message at start up, one
when the maze has been generated and is ready to play, print, or
save, and one when in design mode outlining the actions available. |
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In
getting Maze ready to publish I converted the internal representation
from a fixed size array to a doubly dimensioned dynamic array. I
corrected the "last" bug
relating to this (inserting & deleting columns and rows in design mode),
about 10 minutes ago. So there may be a few rough edges remaining
for you or me to fix. |
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