When you hit it the walls come down (in reverse of the opening animation), the initialization is repeated, and then new walls go up. (The camera is rotated at initialization until it is facing an open cell.) This appears in the square immediately in front of the camera. I considered changing this to WebGL, but I left it like the original for accuracy. I couldn't figure out how to extract these from the screensaver, so I extracted them from a unity clone of the screensaver I found online.īecause these are 2D I have them always rotate with the camera so the normal will always face the user when moving towards them. There are a few textures that appear in the middle of the maze. Then the polyhedra is removed from the map. Movement freezes, and the up vector is rotated 90 degrees about the current direction the camera was faced in. The effect of hitting any polyhedra is the same. This results in a very similar look to the original so it seems certain that Microsoft used a method like this. The coloring is done by having each face be a slightly darker shade of gray than the previous face. Dodecahedrons are a little bit harder than the other three because the sides aren't triangular. There are four types of polyhedra visible: tetrahedrons, octahedrons, octahedrons, and dodecahedrons. These positions (and of the 2D texture objects) are chosen at initialization and stored locally in javascript variables. There are several objects floating throughout the maze. This function is used by both the camera and the rat, but the rat calls it twice as often as the camera so they move at different speeds and it's possible to cross. dead end) - rotate right (which will bring you to a state where the right side is open) if just-turned and front is open - forward.if in the middle of moving or turning, continue moving or turning. The goal is to always follow the right wall. There is a nextMove() function that determines the next step based on the current position, movement, and direction. The lookat function from Maze.js is used, with the eye corresponding to the current location in the maze and the at being the sum of the position vector and the direction vector. So I used GIMP to create the 99x99 image that corresponds to one cell of the maze and then upscaled it to a 128x128 image. The ceiling texture was a 33x33 and this doesn't work well with WebGL because it isn't a Power of Two. Most of the wall is red brick, but occasionally there is an image displayed on the wall, taken from a standard rendering example image that must have been used in the OpenGL manual Microsoft used. These files were extracted from the original screensaver. The walls, floor and ceiling each have specific textures. This array is looked at when determining the next move and when initially sending the vertex data to the GPU. This is randomly generated with recursive backtracking, based on an algorithm I found at. The maze is stored as a 2D array of "cells" with each cell being a four int array describing it's four walls. The matrix libraries used are from here and under the MIT License.įor comparison, a YouTube sample of the original screensaver can be found at Features that have been implemented: This project is a recreation of that screensaver using WebGL and Javascript. Is this whole situation about to flip upside down? Who knows?! It's a wild world in there, and we were all happily along for the ride.In windows 95 (and a few later versions of Windows) there was a screensaver that rendered and then solved a 3D maze with a a few interactive obstacles. The thrills! You never knew what was going to happen. Maybe it's because I don't even use a screen saver anymore (I'm a classy grown-up I just put my computer to "sleep"), but I can't recall anything in the past 20 years that comes close to being as mesmerizing, alluring, frustrating, and exquisite as being lost in the Windows maze. Where did it all start? When was the first time I came to know the blissful, self-loathing joy of spacing out for hours in front of a computer screen without doing a single goddamn useful thing? When I went back through the years, I found where it all began: the maze screen saver on Windows 95. As I pulled myself out of yet another hours-long YouTube rabbit hole last night, unkinked my sedentary, aging bones from their computer desk position, and blinked my red, dry eyes back into a vaguely functioning state, I started wondering where my life had all gone so horribly wrong, the way any junkie does while pulling themselves up after another ill-advised binge.
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