Hint support in CuteMaze

A week ago I wrote a simple maze solver for CuteMaze based on the principle of “dead end filling”, for the purpose of giving the player hints. Unfortunately, I had a pretty busy week and I was delayed in adding it. Some things were avoidable, some things were not, but suffice it to say that I’m glad that it’s done.

The cool thing about dead end filling is that it can solve any of CuteMaze’s mazes very quickly. It is actually a remarkably easy way to solve a maze. You start by iterating over every cell in the maze. Each time you find a dead end, you “fill” the maze from that point until you find a junction. If you treat the start and stop cells as junctions, you will end up with a maze entirely filled except for the path between the start and the stop cells. Once you are done filling in all of the dead ends, you track a fill from the start to the stop to find the cells for the solution.

I guess I’m trying to see just how many projects I can work on at the exact same time. I’m trying to recreate a reported issue with Kapow on the Mac. I’m still playing around with the interface of Simsu. I’m finishing up Peg-E so that it can be reviewed by the KDE developers. Plus, to top it off, I’m also working on adding themes and goals to FocusWriter. I should probably slow down and focus on one project at a time so that they get done faster, but that’s not as much fun!