Processing: Creative Coding and Computational Art

PROCESSING: CREATIVE CODING AND COMPUTATIONAL ART
224
The new function calls I used, min() and max(), are stuck in the head of the for loop:
for (int i=min(width, height); i>min(width, height)/2; i-=max(wStep,
hStep)){...
The min() and max() functions each take two arguments and spit back the lower or higher
value, respectively. I used them to ensure that the maze was drawn correctly, regardless of
what the display window or wStep and hStep values were set to. The problem they solve is
correcting for potential asymmetrical values assigned to the aforementioned variables. For
example, if the width and height arguments in the size() function were set to 600 and
400, my loop wouldn’t be able to adjust itself if I were using width to control the loop
limit. I would always need the smaller dimension to be the loop limit for the autoadjustment
to work. Since (theoretically) users may sometimes make the width argument
bigger than height, or vice versa, there is no way to hard-code a value as the loop limit. By
using the min() and max() functions, the loop automatically figures out the limiting variable
(either the minimum value of either width or height, or the maximum value of wStep
or hStep) and adjusts itself appropriately. This is a hard concept to explain in words, so I
suggest playing with the values for width, height, wStep, and hStep. You can also try substituting
the following for loop head into the sketch:
for (int i=width; i>width/2; i-=wStep)
while continuing to change all four values. You may notice that the substitute loop head
creates less ordered but more interesting output.
Next I created a tiled version of the maze (see Figure 6-37). The sketch puts together a
bunch of concepts discussed thus far in this chapter. There’s a lot more that could be done
with this sketch—for example, adding the scribble() function or additional random()
functions. You could also add another maze pattern algorithm in the createMaze() function.
I’ve included comments that show you what variables you can safely change. (Of
course, safety aside, it‘s also helpful to sometimes break the code to get a better sense of
how it works.)
/*
Maze Tile 1
Ira Greenberg, November 25, 2005
revised October 18, 2006
*/
// declare some vars
float x, y, y2, x2, h, w, xShift, yShift;
//these values can be changed
int xSclFactor = 3;
int ySclFactor = 3;
float wStep = 4;
float hStep = 4;