Mazes for Programmers

Chapter 14Bending and Folding Your Mazes

It’s been a wild ride, but we’re nearly done. Maze algorithms, grids born of non-rectangular tesselations, circles, weaves, and braids, and even building those mazes out in three and four dimensions—it’s all brought us to this point.

Let’s go out with a bang. Let’s blow some minds.

Consider those mazes you’ve generated up to now, all of them neatly built on flat, predictable surfaces. Even the three-dimensional ones were composed of neatly planar levels. But what would happen if you were to take one of those mazes and bend it a bit, warping the surface so that it curves in one or more dimensions? What if you were to even go so far as to fold it?

Those first-person shooters take on an entirely different ...