Killer Game Programming in Java

Making a Maze Plan

The 3D and 2D maze representations employed in Maze3D are created by the MazeManager object after reading in a maze plan from a text file. Here is the plan in maze1.txt:

               s
    bbbbb bbbbb bbbbb bbbbb
    b                     b
    b                     b
    bbbb  ccccc ccccc  bbbb
       b
       b
       b

Figure 25-3 shows that plan realized in Maze3D (via the call java Maze3D maze1.txt).

Figure 25-3. Maze3D using maze1.txt

The s character in the text plan specifies the user's starting position in the maze. By default, the viewpoint is set to point along the positive z-axis in the scene, corresponding to downward in the bird's-eye view. The b characters in the maze plan become blue textured blocks, and the c characters are drawn as green textured cylinders.

Generating a Maze Using Software

A maze plan, like the one in maze1.txt, can be prepared in various ways, the simplest being to type one manually using a text editor. As an alternative, one of my students, Nawapoom Lohajarernvanich, and I wrote a maze generation application, called MazeGen.java (stored in Maze3D/MazeGen/). It utilizes a recursive, depth-first search with backtracking to create a maze.

The program generates a maze in a 2D character array. It assumes the array has an even number of rows and columns, and it creates the outer walls of the maze offset by one cell from the left, right, top, and bottom (see Figure 25-4). This means that the maze boundaries are in the odd rows and ...