- Author: Richard James Howe
- License: The Unlicense / Public Domain
- Email: mailto:howe.r.j.89@gmail.com
- Repo: https://github.com/howerj/tile
Inspired by the tiny maze generation program for Commodore 64 BASIC:
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
This (terrible) maze generator does something similar, written in C. It is
only a few lines of C and is quite dense. The random number generator is
biased (and the standard C
library functions used, rand is
poor), the maze is not
guaranteed to be solvable, and because of the characters used and available
it does not even looks as nice as the BASIC program does on the Commodore 64.
The use cases of this project are:
- To waste time.
If you find a use for this project (which could be replaced by a one line shell script) then you need to reassess your life.
The program has multiple arguments, all of which are optional and are entirely positional in nature.
./tile columns rows seed tiles...
If no options are given then the program runs forever with the default tile set, number of columns (really tiles which can be variable length if specified) and a seed that comes from the current time.
You cannot specify a option without specifying all earlier options (so you
cannot specify seed without specifying both columns and rows). This makes
argument parsing trivial.
The default number of columns is 40 (as each tile in the default set is
2 chars wide this takes up 80 characters on screen before a newline is
printed). Set to a negative or zero value to keep the default.
The default number of rows is infinite. Set this to a negative value
to keep this (zero rows prints nothing).
The default seed is time(NULL), set this to negative to keep this
default, otherwise specify zero or a positive integer as a seed.
The default tile set is "\ ", "/ ", and "__". A random selection
of these tiles will be printed out.
Infinite maze:
./tile
Infinite maze (20 tiles wide):
./tile 20
Maze 20 tiles wide, 20 rows deep (Long? Tall? Whatever):
./tile 20 20
Reproducible mazes, which are just as important as reproducible
builds (20 tiles by 20 rows, seed is 1...although the PRNG will
vary depending on your C library):
./tile 40 40 1
CUSTOM TILES, what every user of tile has been waiting for, this new and
exciting feature has just dropped (20 tiles by 20 rows, seed is 1):
./tile 40 40 1 a b c
Same as above but seed is taken from time(NULL):
./tile 40 40 -1 a b c
An infinite wall of a, b, and you guessed it c, with a seed
chosen to suit your needs. All defaults used apart from the new
tile set:
./tile -1 -1 -1 a b c
This program returns 1 on failure and 0 on success.
I would like to thank no one for this project. It took about 5 minutes.
If you find a bug, just keep it to yourself. No one cares. Go for a walk.