Version 26 of Ramble

Updated 2005-02-23 22:29:06

Ramble is the name I've given to a computer game I'm writing for my kids (in Tcl/Tk, of course). I've begun posting a series of essays about the game's design on my weblog [L1 ]; some of them delve into things of interest to Tcler's, so I'm going to put links to them here. -- WHD

There's now a Ramble Home Page, with downloads: [L2 ].

  • Background: [L3 ]
  • Efficient Matrices: [L4 ] (and tangentially on an efficient implementation of fori)
  • Randomness: [L5 ]
  • Matrix Coordinates: [L6 ]
  • On Visibility: [L7 ]
  • Ramble 0.1: [L8 ]
  • Key Sequences: [L9 ] (has some obscure details about multiple-key event bindings)
  • Ramble 0.2: [L10 ]
  • Things to Avoid: [L11 ]
  • Quest: [L12 ] (an earlier attempt of mine at a tile-based game)
  • Maze Generation 1 [L13 ] (Basic mazes--and hey, there's Tcl code!)
  • Ramble 0.3: [L14 ] (Lots of new stuff.)
  • Combat 1: [L15 ]
  • Maze Generation 2 [L16 ]
  • Ramble 0.4 [L17 ] NEW -- 2/15/2005

Maze Generation

DKF: I'd add comments on your blog pages, but then I'd have to futz around with creating an account for myself...

I've done quite a bit of work on the automatic generation of random mazes in the past. It turns out that (for dense mazes of the sort you seem to be using) there is a way to do the random generation that makes them random in a, well, pleasing way. The key thing is that there is a tunable factor that seems to control how pleasing a maze is; too much one way and you get something very highly branching and where the "centre" of the maze is very easily findable, but too much the other way and you get very long (though twisting) passages with very few junctions. You can grab it off my webpages (and feel free to cannibalize bits out of it).

WHD: I've been working on an essay about that on and off; the essay's coming together only very slowly, but the actual code is working pretty well. For my purposes, a plain maze isn't that useful; it's more what you do with it after it's been generated. Let me write it, and then you can tell me whether you've got anything I should look at.

DKF: The Think Labyrinth page (linked off "Maze Generation 1" for those following along at home) is good fun! Very interesting!


Peter Newman 26 January 2005: I just downloaded the Windows Starkit, and it crashes on start-up if you store the kit in a directory whoose pathname has spaces in it. Looks like you're missing some braces somewhere.

WHD I had an ill-behaved eval in the start-up code. I wish {expand} had been added to 8.4....Anyway, thanks very much for reporting it!


Larry Just a couple comments from my first impression:

  • If you have a high-resolution screen the graphics become too small for my 40+ year old eyes. I'd really like to see some sort of zoom. It is very hard to discern closed doors from walls.
  • The graphic n and D are so close that it is way easy to mistake one for the other. It was a moment before I realized what the LAUDDRY was for. The JUDK DEALER was also a head scratcher, especially since I initially took it for a two-sides vendor like ARMOR and WEAPONS, so DEALER seemed very generic and I had no idea was a JUDK was.
  • reverting to a character menu in a gui program is way inelegant. Would it be that hard to pop up a dialog with a list box?

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