MAZES

David Bolton demonstrates how a Raspberry Pi can create mazes in C/SDL and then solve them with animations.

Credit: https://github.com/joewing

OUR EXPERT

David Bolton has been programming since before the war. Which war? Don’t ask. He wrote a 1,000-player RPG game called Quest in 1989 that is still running today.

You can find many mazegeneration programs in C on the web. Many of those output the mazes as texts. In this example, we’re going to set up Visual Studio Code (aka VS Code) and write a Cprogram that uses the SDL2 library to draw the maze and then solve it.

For this tutorial, the program was developed on a Raspberry Pi 4B, but a 3B would work equally as well. We’ll install this software:

•SDL2 library

•Visual Studio Code and extension

• The Clang compiler and linker

The SDL2 (Simple Direct Media) library isn’t installed by default on a Pi. To compile against SDL2, we need the development versions, which include header files for C and libraries to link against. To see what’s available, run this command in a terminal:

Of the six libraries shown, we only need libsdl2-dev. Before you install it, ensure your system is up to date:

If there are updates, follow it with:

Install SDL2 with this command:

Next is Visual Studio Code. Although it’s possible to compile without an IDE, you will find it much easier with one. VS Code calls itself an editor but if it looks like an IDE and acts like one, to our mind it is an IDE.

To start installing Visual Studio Code, click the down arrow, then click Open on the pop-up menu.

Install Visual Studio Code

Open up the Chromium browser and go to https:// code.visualstudio.com/Download/.

Depending on whether you are running the 32-bit or the 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS, click on the Arm32 or the Arm64 buttons just to the right of .deb.