And Summer Begins...

TODAY was officially, the last day of college this year! I've got two months ahead of me to complete my projects and generally laze around. (excluding the coursework I have to have done for next year) It has been a fun year at college and I'm looking forward to next year as well - although I'm obviously looking forward to the summer much more hehe... Bad news is that my friends have finally got the oppurtunity to track down my blog and read it - not that I mind that much if they do - but at the moment I can basically put anything up online as I know that nobody I know will ever read it *Muahahahaha*, unfortunately, if they find it, it will no longer be the case and I'll have to be more careful. First impressions mean a lot and I know that if I suddenly change, most of the people who know me may feel suspicious and uncomfortable. Unfortunately, I'm pretty adaptable and when I'm with some peeps who I've known for years I get like what I was when I first met them (and get like them too ;) and also, I'm different when writing on the net anyway - could be fun - oh well! hehe...

Hmm, now I'm not at college and have a bit more time, I can leave you with some screenies of a couple of other projects that I started and worked on for a few days while I was at college during exams to relieve the boredom of revision:




The First four show pictures of a small, python powered, maze generator. It's still incomplete as I want to be able to actually play the mazes but the underlying algorithm (a homebrew) is very flexible and should allow for almost any customizations I wish to make - at the moment it only generates simple mazes but in the future, complex mazes should not be too hard to implement (note: simple and complex is used here in a technical sense for mazes with one solution or multiple solutions respectively). The first one shows default settings, the second is the result of decreasing the 'Wall Bias' parameter which in the algorithm is used to calculate the chance that the next filled square will be adjacent to the last, thus creating mazes with the impression of walls, when this is decreased, the maze becomes simpler as the walls are not very continuous (although they are connected), the effect is best seen by trying to solve each maze - the second is more or less a straight path through the center but the first is more twisted - it is called wall bias because it biases the random element of the algorithm to fill in certain suqares. The third and fourth pictures show two different types of 'Directional Bias'. The effect is pretty obvious; however, directional baising only works in conjunction with wall baising, the parameter is used to calculate the chance that the wall will be created more vertically or horizontally over a given square. At the moment, only simple directional biasing is available that is calculated for each square mathematically during generation, but the possiblility of creating 'bias maps' or analyising an existing maze or photo to create a new maze that is similar is unmissible as an oppurtunity for future development. The last screenshot is of a quick program (python again) to jumble up words in such a way as to be readable by most of the human population but not by machines (unless they're clever), it currently only supports common characters or english speaking users but could probably easily be extended to support other encodings and characters. The maze generator is called amaze and the text scrambling utility is txet - neither are licensed yet but if they prove useful or I am requested to, I might license them under the GPL and put them up online.
~lemon. :)