PhotoMaze / News: Recent posts

OK, time to get out a new version. There's a few things that make this release a bit better. The source code is now more suitable for compiling in a GNU environment outside of Netbeans. What this means is that you can use configure and make the way most GNU software is. It also cross-compiles in this fashion, and in fact the windows executable is cross-compiled using 'configure --host=i686-pc-mingw32'. (I have had to do a slight work-around to build a static executable, which is a preferable way for it to be distributed. Next release I should make this happen automatically.)... read more

Just a quick post, for those that are curious, I've posted a quick video of Photomaze showing off some of its features. You can see it here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hf5Zd6wpqhw

OK, so I've neglected the project for a while, but now it's back with a few new features:
- Screenshots - just press F12 to take a screenshot and it will be stored in the same folder as the executable
- Photos textures are now bordered rather than just taking a central square region of the photo, so you see more
- Performance improvements upon loading up your photos as textures by ensuring the worker thread only leaves updating the GL texture object to the main thread
- Pixel buffer objects - used to speed up transferring the photos to textures

I've uploaded a new version of the windows binary and the source. There have been a few changes of note:
- The default location it searches for photos is the My Pictures folder for windows.
- The default location for Linux is now /home/username/Pictures, or if that doesn't exist, /home/username.
- Recursive scanning of folders is now working correctly.
- Photos are now loaded in progressively in small batches which are swapped after a short period of time, and I've reduced the default maze size to help things run faster.... read more

OK, the source is up now. You can browse the subversion repository to get it. So, a little more about PhotoMaze's development.

PhotoMaze, which started out as CMaze (a Maze program written in C), is developed using Netbeans 6.9.1 (http://netbeans.org/downloads/) with the C/C++ plugin. It started out as a project that I wrote using both Windows and Linux (Ubuntu 10.04 specifically), but has ended up being developed solely from Linux, using the MinG cross-compiler. In fact, it won't compile on Windows natively at the moment. But that's ok, I'll always provide windows binaries for those that aren't able to spend time trying to get it to compile.... read more

Hello viewers, how are you? PhotoMaze is a small project that I started a few months ago, firstly in order to learn C. As with most things that I start, if it doesn't go into the trash can within a month, it evolves. This is one that has evolved.

It started out, as I've said, as a way of learning C. At work, if I'm programming, I'm predominantly I'm using Visual Basic and SQL, and only at home do I get to satisfy my need to learn something different. I recalled from my childhood a program that I had that generated mazes, so I figured that that would be my first C project, to generate mazes.... read more