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_ _ _ _____ _ |
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/ \ | |__ ___ _ _ | |_ |_ _|| |__ ___ |
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/ _ \ | '_ \ / _ \ | | | || __| | | | '_ \ / _ \ |
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/ ___ \ | |_) || (_) || |_| || |_ | | | | | || __/ |
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/_/ \_\|_.__/ \___/ \__,_| \__| |_| |_| |_| \___| |
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____ _ __ __ |
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/ ___| ___ _ __ | |__ ___ _ __ | \/ | __ _ ____ ___ |
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| | _ / _ \ | '_ \ | '_ \ / _ \| '__|| |\/| | / _` ||_ // _ \ |
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| |_| || (_) || |_) || | | || __/| | | | | || (_| | / /| __/ |
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\____| \___/ | .__/ |_| |_| \___||_| |_| |_| \__,_|/___|\___| |
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The GopherMaze is a project I made during the tilde.club Weekly |
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Webpage Workshop #5, to play with and learn more about the Gopher |
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protocol. |
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Gopher, being primarily a text-based interface, tends to remind me |
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of various text-based adventure games, which frequently required |
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you to move around a map by specifying cardinal directions (north, |
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south, east and west). |
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Accordingly, I figured it would be fun to make a simple maze as a |
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Gopher site, with the path through the maze being represented by |
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the directory hierarchy. |
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Play the Game |
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__ __ _ __ _ __ __ |
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/ // /___ _ __ (_)/ /_ | | /| / /___ ____ / /__ ___ |
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/ _ // _ \| |/|/ / / // __/ | |/ |/ // _ \ / __// '_/(_-< |
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/_//_/ \___/|__,__/ /_/ \__/ |__/|__/ \___//_/ /_/\_\/___/ |
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The first thing I needed was to generate a maze, so I headed over |
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to Wikipedia to remind myself of some simple maze algorithms, and |
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ended up using a randomized Prim's algorithm to generate the maze. |
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I chose not to use an algorithm which would include loops to |
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simplify generating the navigation links on each page, and also |
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because I didn't want to spend too long on this project! |
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I then hacked up some code to render the maze out to ASCII text, |
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with the ability to mark the start, finish and a specific location |
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within the maze, which would represent the position of the player. |
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This would be displayed on each of the individual pages. |
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I considered using the grid location of each cell in the maze to |
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encode the URL. This would have removed the requirement for |
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subdirectories, but would mean anyone could cheat to jump to the |
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end of the maze. By using subdirectories, it forces the correct |
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solution to the maze to be discovered. After all, this is serious |
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business -- no cheating allowed! |
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I also hacked in some very ugly code to make sure the maze was |
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hard enough -- as it's randomly generated, some of the mazes are |
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particularly easy. This involves checking to make sure you can |
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always go both directions from the start square, that you have to |
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go in every direction at least once to get to the finish, and |
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that there's a minimum number of steps required. |
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The result is a total of 160 gophermap files, one for each cell, |
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in 159 subdirectories. |
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____ ___ ____ |
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/ __// _ | / __ \ |
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/ _/ / __ |/ /_/ / |
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/_/ /_/ |_|\___\_\ |
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Q. I can't find my way out! |
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A. Try drawing on your screen with a Sharpie, it really does make |
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things easier. However, if you still can't find your way out, |
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here is the complete set of steps required: |
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E, S, S, S, S, S, S, S, E, S, E, N, E, N, E, E, E, N, N, N, N, |
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N, N, E, E, E, E, E, E, S, S, E, S, S, E, S, S, W, S, S, S, E |
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____ |
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/ _/___ ___ __ __ ___ ___ |
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_/ / (_-< (_-</ // // -_)(_-< |
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/___//___//___/\_,_/ \__//___/ |
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I originally started using relative links to go 'back' in the maze, |
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so for example, if you went east from the start location, then the |
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west direction would load '../', the previous directory. |
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This worked perfectly in the web proxy, but when attempting to |
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navigate to these relative links from the shell in Lynx, I would |
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get an error. |
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I'm not sure if this was me doing something wrong, or if there is |
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no official ability to specify the parent directory in a gopher |
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link. |
