3D Maze is the name given to a screensaver, created in OpenGL, that was present in Microsoft Windows from Windows 95 [1] until it was discontinued after Windows ME.
3D Maze is the name given to a screensaver, created in OpenGL, that was present in Microsoft Windows from Windows 95 [1] until it was discontinued after Windows ME.
The maze is randomly generated each time, with the "player" navigating through it in first-person, spawning in front of a floating start button. From there, the maze is automatically traversed using the right-hand rule, which will guarantee the maze will eventually be solved because all of the randomly-generated mazes are simply connected (there are no looping paths).
By default, the maze is textured with brick walls, a wooden floor, and an asbestos tile ceiling. Users can customize these textures, swapping them out for animated psychedelic patterns in later versions, or may instead create their own custom textures.
As the maze is traversed, several objects can be found inside it, including floating "OpenGL" logos, images of globes on the walls (which is seen on the cover of the OpenGL Programming Guide), and a 2D sprite image of a rat that is also moving through the maze. Additionally, the "player" will encounter rotating polyhedric gray rocks that, when touched, will flip the camera upside down and turn the floor into the ceiling. When this happens, the "player" will traverse the maze following the left wall rather than the right until the exit is found or another gray rock is encountered, flipping the camera right-side up again.
The exit to the maze is a floating, translucent smiley face. Upon reaching it, the maze will reset and another will be generated. If the maze is completed and reset while upside down, the next maze may be traversed as if it were upside down, hugging the left wall instead of the right.
Users can also enable an overlaid map, which constantly displays the maze using simple vector graphics. On this map, the "player" is represented as a blue triangle, the start as a red triangle, the smiley face as a green triangle, the rocks as rotating white triangles, the OpenGL logos as stationary white triangles, and the rat as an orange triangle.
Cornell University's Maze in a Box, a project to create 3D graphics using the Atmel Mega32 microcontroller, used the 3D Maze screensaver as inspiration. [2] In 2017, independent video game developer Cahoots Malone made Screensaver Subterfuge, a video game based on the screensaver created using assets from the original ssmaze.scr file. [3]
XScreenSaver 5.39, released in April 2018, includes a Maze3D module written by "Sudoer" that replicates the Windows screensaver. [4] [5]
Writing for Bustle, Jessica Blankenship was unable to recall anything that was as "mesmerizing, alluring, frustrating, and exquisite" as getting lost in the 3D Maze screensaver. [6] Slate's Jacob Brogan called the screensaver a "harried, first-person rush through a brick-walled labyrinth" likening it to an "intelligence at work" and went on to compare watching it to watching one's grandparents play Wolfenstein 3D "while sitting in silence as they haplessly mashed the keypad". [7]
OpenGL is a cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D vector graphics. The API is typically used to interact with a graphics processing unit (GPU), to achieve hardware-accelerated rendering.
A screensaver is a computer program that blanks the display screen or fills it with moving images or patterns when the computer has been idle for a designated time. The original purpose of screensavers was to prevent phosphor burn-in on CRT or plasma computer monitors. Though most modern monitors are not susceptible to this issue, screensaver programs are still used for other purposes. Screensavers are often set up to offer a basic layer of security by requiring a password to re-access the device. Some screensaver programs also use otherwise-idle computer resources to do useful work, such as processing for volunteer computing projects.
Direct3D is a graphics application programming interface (API) for Microsoft Windows. Part of DirectX, Direct3D is used to render three-dimensional graphics in applications where performance is important, such as games. Direct3D uses hardware acceleration if it is available on the graphics card, allowing for hardware acceleration of the entire 3D rendering pipeline or even only partial acceleration. Direct3D exposes the advanced graphics capabilities of 3D graphics hardware, including Z-buffering, W-buffering, stencil buffering, spatial anti-aliasing, alpha blending, color blending, mipmapping, texture blending, clipping, culling, atmospheric effects, perspective-correct texture mapping, programmable HLSL shaders and effects. Integration with other DirectX technologies enables Direct3D to deliver such features as video mapping, hardware 3D rendering in 2D overlay planes, and even sprites, providing the use of 2D and 3D graphics in interactive media ties.
Texture mapping is a method for mapping a texture on a computer-generated graphic. Texture here can be high frequency detail, surface texture, or color.
The Utah teapot, or the Newell teapot, is a 3D test model that has become a standard reference object and an in-joke within the computer graphics community. It is a mathematical model of an ordinary Melitta-brand teapot that appears solid with a nearly rotationally symmetrical body. Using a teapot model is considered the 3D equivalent of a "Hello, World!" program, a way to create an easy 3D scene with a somewhat complex model acting as the basic geometry for a scene with a light setup. Some programming libraries, such as the OpenGL Utility Toolkit, even have functions dedicated to drawing teapots.
XScreenSaver is a free and open-source collection of 240+ screensavers for Unix, macOS, iOS and Android operating systems. It was created by Jamie Zawinski in 1992 and is still maintained by him, with new releases coming out several times a year.
Released in August 1997 by Nvidia, the RIVA 128, or "NV3", was one of the first consumer graphics processing units to integrate 3D acceleration in addition to traditional 2D and video acceleration. Its name is an acronym for Real-time Interactive Video and Animation accelerator.
In 3D computer graphics and solid modeling, a polygon mesh is a collection of vertices, edges and faces that defines the shape of a polyhedral object. The faces usually consist of triangles, quadrilaterals (quads), or other simple convex polygons (n-gons), since this simplifies rendering, but may also be more generally composed of concave polygons, or even polygons with holes.
In computer graphics, a shader is a computer program that calculates the appropriate levels of light, darkness, and color during the rendering of a 3D scene - a process known as shading. Shaders have evolved to perform a variety of specialized functions in computer graphics special effects and video post-processing, as well as general-purpose computing on graphics processing units.
The Quake engine is the game engine developed by id Software to power their 1996 video game Quake. It featured true 3D real-time rendering and is now licensed under the terms of GNU General Public License v2.0 or later.
OpenGL for Embedded Systems is a subset of the OpenGL computer graphics rendering application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D computer graphics such as those used by video games, typically hardware-accelerated using a graphics processing unit (GPU). It is designed for embedded systems like smartphones, tablet computers, video game consoles and PDAs. OpenGL ES is the "most widely deployed 3D graphics API in history".
After Dark is a series of computer screensaver software introduced by Berkeley Systems in 1989 for the Apple Macintosh, and in 1991 for Microsoft Windows.
Real-time computer graphics or real-time rendering is the sub-field of computer graphics focused on producing and analyzing images in real time. The term can refer to anything from rendering an application's graphical user interface (GUI) to real-time image analysis, but is most often used in reference to interactive 3D computer graphics, typically using a graphics processing unit (GPU). One example of this concept is a video game that rapidly renders changing 3D environments to produce an illusion of motion.
In 3D computer graphics, polygonal modeling is an approach for modeling objects by representing or approximating their surfaces using polygon meshes. Polygonal modeling is well suited to scanline rendering and is therefore the method of choice for real-time computer graphics. Alternate methods of representing 3D objects include NURBS surfaces, subdivision surfaces, and equation-based representations used in ray tracers.
Cube 2: Sauerbraten is a cross-platform, Quake-like first-person shooter that runs on Microsoft Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Mac OS X using OpenGL and SDL.
Hover! is a video game that combines elements of the games bumper cars and capture the flag. It was included on CD-ROM versions of the Microsoft Windows 95 operating system. It was a showcase for the advanced multimedia capabilities available on personal computers at the time. It is still available from Microsoft. The game will not run on earlier versions of Windows.
The ATI Rage is a series of graphics chipsets developed by ATI Technologies offering graphical user interface (GUI) 2D acceleration, video acceleration, and 3D acceleration developed by ATI Technologies. It is the successor to the ATI Mach series of 2D accelerators.
InfiniteReality refers to a 3D graphics hardware architecture and a family of graphics systems that implemented the aforementioned hardware architecture that was developed and manufactured by Silicon Graphics from 1996 to 2005. The InfiniteReality was positioned as Silicon Graphics' high-end visualization hardware for their MIPS/IRIX platform and was used exclusively in their Onyx family of visualization systems, which are sometimes referred to as "graphics supercomputers" or "visualization supercomputers". The InfiniteReality was marketed to and used by large organizations such as companies and universities that are involved in computer simulation, digital content creation, engineering and research.
Stage3D is an Adobe Flash Player API for rendering interactive 3D graphics with GPU-acceleration, within Flash games and applications. Flash Player or AIR applications written in ActionScript 3 may use Stage3D to render 3D graphics, and such applications run natively on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Apple iOS and Google Android. Stage3D is similar in purpose and design to WebGL.
This is a glossary of terms relating to computer graphics.