Variations on a maze
From Maze
(Difference between revisions)
(Maze walking, solvability, generate-and-test moved to Variations on a maze: Was originally added to Michael's page of this title due to shared reference to video game history -- content has since forked, and page title doesn't match contents.) | (→Games) | ||
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Because the original program is a concise randomized offset to a region of the PETCSII character table, our variations are limited to other such lookups. The code is limited by the characters available in PETSCII, and the concision or elegance of the code is affected by the adjacency of characters, which must otherwise be randomized in a more complex way than an offset. | Because the original program is a concise randomized offset to a region of the PETCSII character table, our variations are limited to other such lookups. The code is limited by the characters available in PETSCII, and the concision or elegance of the code is affected by the adjacency of characters, which must otherwise be randomized in a more complex way than an offset. | ||
| − | == Games == | + | == Context: Computer Graphics and Games == |
[[Image:Atari2600-pacman.gif|thumb|200px]] | [[Image:Atari2600-pacman.gif|thumb|200px]] | ||
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[[Image:Atari2600-maze_craze.png|thumb|200px]] | [[Image:Atari2600-maze_craze.png|thumb|200px]] | ||
| + | The representation of mazes in computer graphics was already a staple during the period that finds the ''10 Print'' BASIC one-liner appearing in C64 manuals and journals -- in fact, the use of computers to represent mazes conceptually was common before computer graphics. | ||
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| + | (Sidebar / aside on thumbnail sketch of IF and box diagram mazes, relationship to home computing and dominance of early PC video game industry?) | ||
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| + | In graphical games, | ||
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One common feature of the many different maze games from the period is orientation: all both rectilinear and aligned to the Cartesian axes. Different examples have their own aesthetics -- Pac Man partitions the screen space into an open field a indirect routes, Maze Craze creates a traditional full-screen overview with a single solution, while Adventure produces a claustrophobic view in which only part of the impossibly wrapping maze topology is visible at any time -- usually nearby but inaccessible paths. What all have in common is that they are constructed of horizontal/vertical walls that are orthogonal to the edges of the screen and the scan line of the display. | One common feature of the many different maze games from the period is orientation: all both rectilinear and aligned to the Cartesian axes. Different examples have their own aesthetics -- Pac Man partitions the screen space into an open field a indirect routes, Maze Craze creates a traditional full-screen overview with a single solution, while Adventure produces a claustrophobic view in which only part of the impossibly wrapping maze topology is visible at any time -- usually nearby but inaccessible paths. What all have in common is that they are constructed of horizontal/vertical walls that are orthogonal to the edges of the screen and the scan line of the display. | ||
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| + | (presence of the diagonal line at all -- isometric projection itself not unheard of, but far from the norm -- Marble Madness not until 1984) | ||
== Patterns == | == Patterns == | ||
