Maze Creator

Hi,

I have been working on a Tiler manual.  It is in Draft form and will give you some insite.  The only thing to remember is really the graphic "chunks" that you will develop.  How this has been done by other creators (including myself) is to figure out how big a TILE will be in the finished product.  A 100x100 pixel Tile is about a good size, but really it can be bigger or smaller depending upon what you are trying to create.  Just keep in mind, most color printers will print at 300x300 DPI or 3x3 tiles/inch.  If you make a tile 300x300, you will get 8 across and 11 down at best at full resolution.

You will need a minimum of 16 tiles, one for each combination of North, South, East, and West.  Look at page 5 of the attached DRAFT document.  You can see the different combinations and the final TILER format which is simply all the Tiles place in a matrix in a final image.  The N,S,E & W paths need to connect to look correct, that is, the N of one should match the S of all the others.  Maze Creator creates a maze and then selects the appropriate Tile and copies it to the output device.

Also, review the sample to see how it works.  Please let me know if you need help or advise.

Regards,
Greg Peatfield
Maze Creator Author

Although some of our clients have proven that Maze Creator runs under PC emulation on a MAC, Maze Creator cannot support this installation.  You are welcome to install the software on a MAC an purchase a license.  The only help we can offer is the following message from a client that got this working:

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Dear Greg,

Everything is up and running well.

Now to details:

First trial.

eMac running Mac OS X Version 10.2.4
Processor: 800 MHz PowerPC G4
Memory: 256 MB

running Virtual PC 5 with update: 5.0.4 and 140 MB RAM allocated running Windows ME.
Internal Modem.
***********************************************************************************************************
PowerPC Macintosh G3 running Mac OS 9.2.2
Memory: 96 MB
Virtual Memory: 150 MB

running Virtual PC 4 with 40 MB RAM allocated running Windows 98 SE.
External Modem running at between 28800 and 36000.
***************************************************************************************************
In both cases the set up for downloading Maze Creator is the same and the same as for a straight Windows computer.

Ensure that you have VirtualPC set up to access the internet, access to shared folders or that you can print directly to your printer.

Open your dial-up (Internet Connect or Remote Access) so that your computer is logged on to your ISP.

Start up VirtualPC and Internet Explorer. Log on to the Maze Creator pages.

All the rest is the same as for a windows computer.

If your virtualPC has shared folders setup then mazes may be saved to these folders on the Macintosh and used/opened in other applications such as a photo application or inserted into a MSWord file (after saving in a different format eg JPG).

The main problem I had was my phone connection to the modem kept dropping out this morning and I had to allocate more memory to VirtualPC as the browser and downloading was taking too much memory. My G3 only has 96MB and therefore I could only allocate 40 MB to VirtualPC when I set it up. MacOS 9x allows you to allocate more memory to an application through File - Get Info - Memory. MacOS X allocates more when it is needed.

I would suggest that people make sure they can surf the web from their browser in VirtualPC before they try downloading anything as this will help eliminate problems beforehand.

Regards,
Marilyn



Hi,

Well a minor bug was found in 3.60 in how Color is filled into the non-tiler mazes.  The solution and end points default to Black rather than their assigned color.  We are working on rapidly correcting this issue and hope to have a bug fix release out by the weekend.

Maze Creator STD 3.60 has been released.  Here are some of the major updates in this release:

• ADDED: Wrap maze Horizontally and Vertically
• ADDED: Mouse Gestures, command Maze Creator by mouse movements
• ADDED: Paste graphics into Foreground & Background from Clipboard (DIB, BITMAP, ENHMETAFILE)
• ADDED: Paste text into Text layer
• ADDED: Opacity setting for TILER, now supports version TLE 1.50
• IMPROVED: Default of START/STOP tools is visible for TILERs and hidden for other styles
• IMPROVED: Auto fill of START/STOP is visible for TILERs and hidden for other styles
• IMPROVED: Paste feature, requests clipboard contents in Graphic Layer, auto fills text boxes with text on the clipboard
• IMPROVED: Text Layer artifacts while deleting text block from layer
• IMPROVED: Maze generation algorithm, closer adherence to generation rules should make more complex mazes
• IMPROVED: User Interface to help make selections more obvious

Attached are the Hot Keys for Maze Creator PRO 1.6+ currently in BETA.  This is fairly complete, covers the main repetitive tools & actions.