A* Path finding for PNG mazes, from Ruby now in Crystal! Using StumpyPNG! Now ×40 faster than its Ruby counterpart: A-Star

Build it from source: Clone and enter repository:

git clone https://github.com/Demonstrandum/Crystal-Maze.git && cd Crystal-Maze

then install dependencies with shards (StumpyPNG):

shards install

and run the make file:

make
sudo make install clean
#sudo make uninstall # to remove the program

To run the program itself:

maze ~/Pictures/yourImage.png

This will solve the maze and make and image with the suffix "-solved"
e.g. yourImage-solved.png in the same location as the input image.

You can also add optional arguments of heuristic distance type, verbosity and wheather to draw nodes or not. For heuristic distance just type euclidean or manhattan as argument for distance calculation type, these are the only two currently supported. Showing nodes is done with the argument --show-nodes and for verbosity (prints the nodes of the final path) either -v, verbose or --verbose.

For example:

maze euclidean -v hipMaze.png --show-nodes

Maze being mapped out by flood and then solved with A*

You can animate the solving with the --gif argument, this looks better with --show-nodes as you can see the nodes being placed and spreading. e.g.

maze mazes/50-maze.png --show-nodes --gif

The gif will most likely be very slow, so you can drop some frames to speed it up:

maze mazes/normal.png --show-nodes --gif --gif-speed 14

The above means: only keep every 14th frame.

which generates mazes/50-maze-solved.gif Be careful, when making GIFs with large mazes, the program will use a lot of memory and may freeze your computer!

The start and end points of the maze must be white and be from top or left to bottom or right, if this is not true, then it means the maze has a black border, in which case it will find a green pixel (doesn't have to be perfect green) and sets that as the start point and then finds a red pixel (doesn't have to be perfect red) and sets that as the end point.

P.S. It's highly recommended that the maze's walls and paths are 1 pixel wide as the program draws and reads the paths as one pixel.