TriadCity Message of the Day
2003-04-29

Three new maze types are now online. These'll allow world authors the ability to generate mazes with different characteristics, while at the same time, we hope, eliminating the occasional bugs we saw with our older implementations.

What's the fun in maze algorithms? Basically, that mazes can be dynamically generated which will be more or less difficult to solve, with greater or fewer dead-ends and double-backs and other difficulties. These characteristics seem to us to be more evident in larger mazes, but you may find them everywhere, we dunno yet.

For geek types, the three algorithms now in use are Prim's Algorithm, Kuksal's Algorithm, and an improved version of the standard depth-first search algorithm we'd used previously. In future there may be more.

In testing, the new code has completely eliminated the dead spots which had previously appeared intermittently. We'd sometimes found that players who'd logged off inside a maze, then returned sometime after a reboot, sometimes found themselves stranded inside rooms with no exits. We think this'll go away now.

You'll also notice structural changes to McDougal's Cavern, and perhaps other places. We hope you find them interesting!

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