Or a subplot about how the main marine, played by Karl Urban, lost his parents to mars research, and while you might think this could have some sort of thrilling revelation along the lines of "karl ur mum's actually a martian" all that comes out of it is a hilarious scene where he stares out of a window as an audio flashback to his parents falling off a cliff plays. There's some throwaway lines about HMM MAYBE THE MARS PEOPLE ARE OUR ANCESTORS and OH NO THIS TECHNOLOGY CUT OFF A GUYS LEGS ONCE, but ultimately it's just a way for the characters to awkwardly shuffle around from one set to another. For instance, the film's opening crawl explains that people get to mars via an ancient martian device called THE ARK which teleports people to earth via the capri sun pouch liquid metal cgi. Slate's Jacob Brogan called the screensaver a "harried, first-person rush through a brick-walled labyrinth" likening it to an "intelligence at work" and went on to compare watching it to watching one's grandparents play Wolfenstein 3D "while sitting in silence as they haplessly mashed the keypad".For those who have blessedly forgotten about this film, the plot is "bad stuff happening on mars, marines gotta stop it." There's a lot of convoluted ancillary plot lines to this film, but they don't matter because none of them are remotely relevant. Writing for Bustle, Jessica Blankenship was unable to recall anything that was as "mesmerizing, alluring, frustrating, and exquisite" as getting lost in the 3D Maze screensaver.
XScreenSaver 5.39, released in April 2018, includes a Maze3D module written by "Sudoer" that replicates the Windows screensaver. In 2017, independent video game developer Cahoots Malone made Screensaver Subterfuge, a video game based on the screensaver created using assets from the original ssmaze.scr file. On this map, the "player" is represented as a blue triangle, the start as a red triangle, the smiley face as a green triangle, the rocks as rotating white triangles, the OpenGL logos as stationary white triangles, and the rat as an orange triangle.Ĭornell University's Maze in a Box, a project to create 3D graphics using the Atmel Mega32 microcontroller, used the 3D Maze screensaver as inspiration.
Users can also enable an overlaid map, which constantly displays the maze using simple vector graphics. Upon reaching it, the maze will reset and another will be generated. The exit to the maze is a floating, translucent smiley face.
When this happens, the "player" will traverse the maze following the right wall rather than the left until the exit is found or another gray rock is encountered. Additionally, the "player" will encounter rotating polyhedric gray rocks that, when touched, will flip the camera upside down and turn the floor into the ceiling. Users can customize these textures, swapping them out for animated psychedelic patterns in later versions, or may instead create their own custom textures.Īs the maze is traversed, several objects can be found inside it, including floating "OpenGL" logos, images of globes on the walls (which is seen on the cover of the OpenGL Programming Guide), and a 2D sprite image of a rat that is also moving through the maze. From there, the maze is automatically traversed using the left-hand rule, which will guarantee the maze will eventually be solved because all of the randomly-generated mazes are simply connected.īy default, the maze is textured with brick walls, a wooden floor, and an asbestos tile ceiling. The maze is randomly generated each time, with the "player" navigating through it in first-person, spawning in front of a floating start button.