amaze / News: Recent posts

This release fixes the frequent "no maze" green screen error message, which got very frequent and annoying for high "Stay" settings.

Also added some more Spanish localization, and a French man-page. None of the localization targets are complete, but they are improving slowly.

Just made release 1.2-1 available for download: 64-bit Debian package (tested on Mint Qiana) and 32-bit NSIS-based Windows package (tested on 32-bit Windows XP and 64-bit Windows 7); no MSI version this time.

This release should work with current Qt libraries and up-to-date external links. There are no new features; the aim was to get a first refresh out the door. There are some bugfixes and more complete localization files.

For versioning, we will be going from 1.1-xx to 1.2-xx. Since this is really just a reboot of the same source base, going to 2.0-xx would be overkill.

Working on the Windows version, I'd like to cross-compile in Linux instead of having to maintain a separate build environment on a Windows system. I'm looking into using MXE (http://mxe.cc/), which seems very promising. Not sure yet whether to bother with a 32-bit version this time, or limit it to 64-bit only. The old target was Windows XP; the new minumum will probably be Windows 7.... read more

The old (1.1-22) Blender export boilerplate worked with Blender 2.49, but the current Blender 2.73 has a much changed API. Rewrote to match it. Also found out the X3D export is broken, but since nobody seems to use that format (except view3dscene) it is not urgent.

I did not manage to get the wiki restored in its original form, so I converted all of the old pages to now appear under the "wiki" tab in the project page. Since the old format was mediawiki markup, and the project wiki uses markdown, I had to write semi-automatic conversion script and then patch up the result by hand here and there. I also considered moving to a tiddlywiki (single-page javascript solution), but that looks very different. The main problem now is that the online help refers to the old wiki URL, so it will take a new release just to fix the URL hard-coded into the executable.... read more

Came back after a long time to refresh the project.... way overdue. This wiki has been out for a while (since SourceForge ditched hosted apps), so as a first step I'm trying to get that back up. Running into an issue with mediawiki: DB seems to contain the page texts, but they do not show up.

The last two weeks were pretty quit in this project: We moved to a new house, and are still unpacking stuff. Maybe I can get a 1.1-23 release out by the end of the month, i.e. one week from now. Been working on adding SVG output, but it's very incomplete right now.

A turbulent release!
Unfortunately 1.1-21 broke outline masks, so the "Amaze Valentine" shortcut was useless as well -- sorry about that. This release 1.1-22 fixes that.
Check out the next "Talk" menu, to select the GUI language on the fly (cf. the CLI "-locale" option). It effectively tears down and rebuilds the GUI window in the same spot, with a new language. In doing so, it loses some info (e.g. message font selection); future versions will aim to fix those glitches.... read more

Making some progress on an NSIS-based installer to side-step the issues with the WiX-based one. May have a workable one by tomorrow. Should look into some way to set a locale preference from inside Amaze too, even if the effect would be delayed until the next run.

I'm working on the installer failures on non-US Windows.
They are due to it relying on the name "BUILTIN\Administrators" as a group name; turns out the names is localized and not easily made non-local.
Temporary work-around: donwload "amaze-1.1-21.zip" instead, unpack, cd to directory, run "amaze.exe".

I've started on an NSIS-based installer as an alternative to the MSI/WiX approach. Since I'm new to NSIS it may take a while. Now 1% ready, see CVS qtamaze/amaze/amaze.nsi -- the other 99% will follow.

Thanks to user ''fhaag'' for reporting an installation problem for non-US Wiindows: "BUILTIN\Administrators" is undefined. It turns out this name is different on other locales, and needs to either be localized (separate installers!) or somehow translated from the fixed SID. Work in progress...

No real new features, mainly small fixes and extensions:
* Help>Manual opens up the wiki start-page for online help; some of that has been localized.
* View>TextFont opens a dialog to select the message font.
* Message letters are scaled with the tile size.
* Outlines with islands get reduced to the single largest island.

This release adds "mazegrams" or message mazes: You can enter a message, and it will appear in the maze, split into individual letters on the solution path, while the rest of the maze has random letters strewn over it. Solve the maze to read back the message! No great feat of cryptography (more like ROT13), but it should add some fun.

This feature still needs more work (I'll add a wiki page), but should be usable as is, for any small alphabet using a single Unicode char per letter. For now this excludes Chinese (because of the huge alphabet).

Oops, the tags-table for PNG in Export-as-file can srgfault the VRML export dialog; will fix in upcoming 1.1-20.

In the meantime, moving some stuff into the Wiki (see http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/qtamaze/ for more).
Also received some helpful review feedback from snapfiles.com (thank you!) which I will start considering, mainly about better support for printing, saving prefs, and better doc.

Blender export fixed, still no markers or path indication though in script.
Fixed MEL export too but not tested yet.
Added "auto-increment" option on Export-as-file dialog so it will generate the names for you when you have a series of exports to do.
Fixed some accelerator clashes.

Overdue clean-up and fix for the Blender export code, will be in 1.1-19. Added a wiki recently, now added a series of updated screenshots there, see: https://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/qtamaze/index.php?title=Screenshots

There are a lot of half-finished areas in Amaze at the moment: imath-outlines (procedural masking), SVG output, path animation in export, localization, automated updates, concentric-ring mazes, Unicode box drawing, completing 3D export, etc. I'm somewhat torn between slogging through those first, or adding more features that would expand the kinds of mazes offered beyond plain cell-grid based ones.

Well, that's embarrassing -- the Export-to-Blender feature look pretty broken. The scripts run, but for non-square tiles the result is a mess. I was going to look into automating the invocation of Blender itself, but it looks like the mazecode part needs fixing first. I had not really looked at it since taking up this project again a month ago.

Other items that needs some TLC soon in this project are: the "empty border" for exported images, substandard/missing parts of localization, islands in outlines, and display of "no maze" cases.

Worked on the Help>Update dialog to include possible download and installation of upgrades, at the user's behest. Needs some more polish, but takes some of the user effort out of upgrading.

Interim release, adds some minor fixes, plus better error reports on mask image load issues. Got partial localized man-pages for [nl], [de] in the Debian package.
Added new mask twist: [imath], followed by formula. Still under development and no GUI control yet, but you can do this and get a circle: amaze -mask "[imath](x*x)+(y*y)<1".

Hm, not quite as bad as I thought, the failures to load outlines depend more on the contents of the images. For some reason, clean plain PNG files work, GIF sometimes works, JPG has more issues. May be some problem with QImage.load(), investigating...

Well that sucks -- the outline/mask image feature works fine on my dev system, both on Ubuntu and Win XP, as regular user and as admin, but it turns out it does *not* work on my Eee PC netbook, nor on my SO's Win 7 system! On the last to, it always reports the image file as invalid, whether through File>OpenOutline or drag-and-drop to the canvas. Will investigate tomorrow, release 1.1-17 coming soon...

New release has Edit>Ratio (Ctrl-R) to set height in a new way.
Also, dragging an outline onto the canvas will now automatically adjust the height to preserve the original aspect ratio of the (auto-cropped) image.
Added a status bar to show the status tips; suppressed in mini-mode.

Once again a minor release. Highlight: finally changed the user controls to work in terms of "tiles", not "cells" -- internally everything is still cells. Added eye candy: new View>SpinColors (also used in demo mode now), which rotates all 3 user-defined colors +10 degrees on the HSV color-wheel. Shortcut: Ctrl-2. Also fixes some crash bugs, when enter==leave.

¡Hola!
Por la última semana, aquí los países más activos en downloads[?] de Amaze; media parte son hispanohablantes:

1. España
...
5. México
...
8. Chile
9. Colombia
10. Venezuela

Entonces querría presentar una mejor localización por "es".
Si puedes, pro favor, dígame cuando falten traducciones en el UI, o si las palabras usadas non sean las justas. También podrías ver directamente a los archivos, especialmente [url] http://qtamaze.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/qtamaze/amaze/doc/help_es.htx?view=markup [/url]
Gracias,
--tinco

Well release 1.1-13 was short lived (just a patch on 1.1-12 for delayed color change), here is 1.1-14!
Highlights:
(1) New option "-mini" to run on smaller screens (down to 320x200), by leaving out sliders and some decoration.
(2) New option "-demo" / shortcut F1 / action View>Demo, to run in demo mode: cycles between tile shapes, and between path show modes. Auto-pauses/resumes for user input, toggle off F1.
(3) Bit more localization. Really need a proofreader for the locale strings! Any volunteers?