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.
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:
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.
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.
Thanks