Maze Wars SVG Finally Released

I’ve re-created the classic, multi-player, first-person shooter game “Maze Wars” using modern web technologies (server-side: Java; client-side: XHTML, Javascript, Ajax, and Scalable Vector Graphics). Today, that re-creation has reached beta status, and I believe is ready for general use. It's available on SourceForge, where you can find not only the GPL source, but a pre-built WAR file just waiting to be deployed to your favorite Java web application server. (I’ve only tested it with Tomcat, however.)

Work on this project began sometime around July, 2008, and after going through several periods of dormancy, is finally clean enough and feature complete enough to merit public promotion. It is based on my recollections (and a few graphics files I held onto) of playing a version written for the original Macintosh, sometime around 1987. When the consulting phone wasn’t ringing, it brought productivity to a halt among our office Mac users for several weeks. Legend has it that it had exactly the same effect on a little corporation called Apple Computer.

I’m not talking about the commercial version that eventually appeared (MacroMind “Maze Wars+”). No, this implementation was something else, and earlier. If memory serves, it had the video RAM address of the original 128K Mac hard-coded into it. I remember patching the binary several times in subsequent years to keep it working (video RAM kept moving as Macs gained memory), but eventually Macs changed enough that keeping the game working was beyond mere binary hacking, and the game effectively died. I have no idea who wrote it (let me know if you do), but thanks to whoever was responsible. A lot of people had a lot of fun with it.

(Of course, profound thanks must also go to the creators of the original Maze War game in 1973: Steve Colley, Howard Palmer and Greg Thompson.)

All these years later, I found myself missing the Maze Wars game, and decided that with Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) resurgent among modern browsers (Safari, Firefox, and now Chrome) I might be able to recreate it for the web. And it looks very much like I’ve succeeded.

You can get some idea of what the original Macintosh game looked like, and how it built its graphics, from the following files (originally in MacPaint format) that were a part of that game.

There were the eyeballs, of course. All the players were represented by eyeballs. As you can see, they were pre-rendered in parts that could be blitted together to form an eyeball at any of the supported sizes (9) and angles (4). If it’s not obvious, the “ball” portion of each eyeball was the same for every view at any given size. It was only the middle portion that changed, which is why there are renderings of the iris and sclera facing head-on, to the left, and to the right, next to each eyeball, and that’s also why the tail, which appears on the eyeballs by default, is carefully drawn such that it stays within that middle portion of the ball – blitting an iris/sclera section onto the eyeball would completely hide the tail. By blitting (or not) a new middle segment onto each ball, any eyeball view could be created very simply. (The four images occupying the right side of the file weren’t visible in the game. They seem to be the doodlings that led the artist to the final renderings on the left side.)

My eyeballs are a bit simpler, omitting the veins in the sclera, for instance, but they’ve gained things the originals didn’t have, like gradient shadings, and individually colored irises. Seen from behind, they retain the pointed tail, because it just wouldn’t have been the same without it, but, because it took me something like three hours to work out the spline curve definitions for drawing the tail, I decided to forgo including any portion of it in the side views.

The game’s screen looked like the top half of this graphic. The first-person maze view was on the left, on the right was the maze map showing the location of yourself and the teleport stations (the circles), and, if memory serves, in the empty space below the first-person maze view was a list of players and, presumably, their scores. The first-person maze view was, like the eyeballs, built by blitting together the pre-rendered elements in the bottom two squares. Wherever a corridor branched-off the one you were looking into, a vertical slice from the right hand square was blitted over the corresponding portion of the left hand square, and—presto!—the uninterrupted walls meeting at a distant vanishing point were now interrupted wherever necessary. No drawing, as such, was required, just a lot of clever blitting together of off-screen bitmaps.

I’ve used a very similar approach in my implementation—not with bitmaps, of course, but with a collection of pre-positioned SVG wall polygons and corridor rectangles which can effortlessly be made visible or invisible by altering their “style.display” properties—because it’s wonderfully simple and effective, and remarkably authentic. It also uncomplicates the implementation in a lot of subtle but important ways, and it even, I realized, creates a rendering bug in one case. I didn’t notice that bug until I’d implemented it myself, but I’m sure it must have been present (though a bit less obvious) in the original version. In practice, I think almost no one will notice it, so I’ll leave it for you to find – or not.

There are, of course, a number of differences between my first-person rendering and the original. For one thing, there’s gradient shading so that everything fades to black by the time it reaches the vanishing point. There’s a hint of color to the floor. Stretches of wall are not featureless; they are interrupted by vertical black lines where corridors would otherwise branch off. (That may enhance the sense of perspective, but I’d’ve preferred not to have those lines. Things just kind of inevitably turned-out that way, and I couldn’t find a good work-around, or an overwhelming reason for being displeased, so the lines remain.) Teleport discs are visible in the first-person view, and they’re a very obvious blue – matched by their representation in the maze map. And, by the way, the sky is black. I’m almost certain that real killer eyeballs only come out at night, so that was a detail that needed fixing.

Other differences: On-screen instructions as you enter the game! A new, random maze for every round of the game. (However, I’ve retained the original 33 X 46 dimensions of the maze. After some experimenting, the original size seemed just right - neither too big, nor too small, for good play.) Problems with clipping long player names due to bugs in the SVG implementations of Safari, Chrome and Firefox. Bonuses for killing campers. And, last (I think), but not least: Bots, so there’ll never be fewer than ten players in the game, even if you can’t get anyone else to play.

The results look something like this, but, being rendered using SVG, they are resolution independent. So, stretch out the game window to fill your screen and everything scales-up immaculately – giant killer eyeballs!

If you’re comfortable deploying Java web applications, and believe in using modern web browsers, give Maze Wars SVG a try, and please have fun.