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Welcome to the Maze Race home page. This page is very simple, I did not have time to to a bang up job. Steler VII was the first 3D game I played on a computer being the Apple ][C. Steler VII was a space simulation where the player would fly a fighter ship and destroy the enemy. Much has changed in the way of hardware and software sense those days. Now lighting fast video cards and OpenGL are the voices of game geeks.

Maze Race was started so the programmer could learn some of the theory behind 3D game development. Finding out there is a lot involved in programming a simple 3D game engine is only one of the many problems being encountered. But I hope the game will be finished in the future.

Maze Race is an application which allows the user to create a computer generated maze and walk through the maze in a first person view rendered using OpenGL. "It's not what you draw, it's what you don't draw" is the idea at which Maze Race was designed and programmed. Generating a random maze with a valid path through the maze, converting the maze grid to polygons and sending them to the rendering pipe line is easy. But when rendering extremely high numbers of polygons, the frame rate can become considerably low. Using view frustum culling and back face culling is not adequate for high numbers of polygons. Visibility determination and potentially visible sets is a must.

• Generates a random maze with a path or paths from the bottom left corner to the top right corner of the maze.  100% Complete
• Converts the maze grid into polygons which represent a 3D world.  100% Complete
• Using spatial subdivision the world is divided up into box like sectors. (Sectors and Portals) 100% Complete
• When the player is virtually standing in a sector, that sector is rendered and the sectors linked using portals are also rendered. (Sectors and Portals) 20% Complete
• A well designed GUI provides the user with a good deal of control. 100% Complete
• Visibility determination using sectors, portals, quad trees, quick sort, and a depth buffer. 70% Complete
• Provides the user with feedback when needed on the current state. 20% Complete
• Configure section allows the user to customize the application. 0% Complete
• AI bots rome the maze looking for the exit using A* algorithms. 0% Complete
• HTML integrated help. 10% Complete

Click on thumbnail to see bigger image.

Front end of the GUI, the green text is being rendered using the GLF library. When moving it looks like someone is typing the message on the screen.

Step one in generating a random maze. The user enters specifications desired.

Top view of the maze. The yellow/red boxes are the sector boarders. While the maze grid is represented by the green boxes.

Using a quad tree, sectors which are inside the view frustum can be quickly found and rendered. A quick sort algorithm sorts the sectors in relation to their distance from the eye of the view frustum.

When the application feels it is important to display a message to the user, a cool 3D rotating message will appear.

Quick online help and documentation using HTML is build into Maze Race. Currently displaying the QT documentation. As soon as I get around to writing help files and code documentation, the QT documentation will not be the default startup page.

Requirements:

• QT-2.2.4
• QT-devel-2.2.4
• tmake
• OpenGL or MesaGL



Maze Race, see About:
Copyright (C) 2001  Matthew Tang

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2
of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307, USA.

• Finish the visibility determination algorithm.
• Build in path finding A* algorithms and connect them to virtual bots.
• Textures, tessellation and lighting.
• Code optimization.
• When program exits all allocated memory should be deallocated. I saw an excellent tutorial on flipcode.com on how to do this.
• Write documentation for application and source code.
• Allow the user to save and load the maze data.
• Fix bugs.

• grep FIXME * in the directory containing the source code, and see all the little/bix things which need to be fixed.
• In order of the quad tree generation to work correctly the maze grid must be square.
• Also the quad tree could be optimized to take up less space. This should be in the grep FIXME *.
• The helpWindowWidget needs a lot of work.

If you feal you can contriubute to this project in any way, then feel free to email mt at mltang@carbon.cudenver.edu
 

This is on my TODO list.