Getting back to maze creation, I thought it might be interesting to create animations of the maze growing algorithms, as an aid to debugging and just for general coolness. The easiest way to do that is to save an animated GIF file, because those can be viewed in any web browser without any added software. The only problem is that I didn’t know how to do it. Google is your friend, however, and I found an example of how to create an animated GIF on the Java Forums.

The example has a problem. It animates a GIF of four frames by pulling in four images from the web, and it so happens that the links to those images are now dead. Consequently, you end up with a run-time error. Not to worry; I massaged the code so that it creates a number of small images in memory an animates those. Here’s my proof of concept:

Not fancy, but it works nicely.