ConwayLife.com

NNlk05 wrote: Yesterday, 7:07 pm How do I de/encode mutistate RLE? I need to decode LifeHistory for one of my programs.

The format is described in Golly's Help > File Formats.

Unfortunately, it appears that the issue is even worse after building 5.1b1 from source with the default local-gtk.mk configuration. Zooming into a large pattern while it was running actually ended up freezing the entire program indefinitely, until I killed it.

Which version of wxGTK did you ...

Sorry for the late reply, but unfortunately changing that setting didn't fix the problem. It also does indeed happen with the keyboard shortcuts you mentioned, as well as the numbered keyboard shortcuts like pressing 1 for 1:1.

Can you describe the "stutter" in more detail? Does it happen when ...

At default or higher step speed, zooming on large patterns causes noticeable stutter.

I'm assuming this only happens when using your mouse wheel to zoom in/out (and not when using the keyboard shortcuts [ and ], or the +/- cursors)? I don't really know why this would cause problems on your ...

otismo wrote: August 12th, 2026, 3:02 pm if i add 100 Mb of patterns, can i sell it as an "app"

No.

P.S. how about if i also add the latest version of "the book" in PDF

I'm pretty confident the authors wouldn't agree to that.

MDA wrote: August 10th, 2026, 4:39 am Is it currently possible to configure Golly to remove line breaks from RLEs?

There's no setting to do that but it would be very easy to write a small Lua/Python script to remove line breaks from a given RLE (via file or clipboard).

Just to clarify, this is occurring on small patterns, correct? If you have the time, would you mind also checking if this occurs when running using hyper speed? I'll see if I can borrow a Macbook from a friend to test it myself as well.

I've only tried testing small patterns like rabbits or r ...

Crashes on my macOS system (M3 MacBook Air) when I try to run any pattern. Typical crash log:


-------------------------------------
Translated Report (Full Report Below)
-------------------------------------

Process: GOLDE [56948]
Path: /Applications/GOLDE.app/Contents/MacOS/GOLDE
Identifier ...

So ideally I'd still like to have a mechanism to easily promote Live Pattern Repository contents to full membership in Golly's pattern collection...

There could be a problem with that if you want to store the Repository somewhere inside Golly's Patterns folder. Some Golly installations ...

While experimenting with rule files, I stumbled upon this minor but weird bug when defining a variable with a comma ...

I've fixed that particular bug for the next release, and improved the error reporting. It's still possible to make syntax errors that won't be detected but I'm reluctant to ...

FlutterWithKSparkler wrote: February 3rd, 2026, 12:56 pm Is this intended behavior,

No, but not a bug I'm likely to bother fixing.

and does it affect display and simulation of those much sparser astronomically spaced patterns like the RCT?

No, those operations use Tom Rokicki's bigint class which supports arbitrarily large (or small) integers.

The download could really be just one ZIP file, made available with the existing Online Archives mechanism. Maybe a script would decompress the ZIP file into individual RLEs and/or whatever folder structure was necessary.

No need for a script -- Golly automatically decompresses a zip file and ...

Is there any plan to support GTK3?

It should be possible to build a GTK3 version of Golly using the current source code, but I wasn't able to get it working for some reason. I first installed the GTK3 headers and libraries via "sudo apt install libgtk-3-dev". Then I rebuilt the wxWidgets libs ...

Linux-User here. I want suggest, that Golly only in X11 works (on my computer).

Sorry, but we dropped support for X11 many years ago (too many bugs and limitations in the wxWidgets X11 libs). Golly 1.4 was the last release that had an X11 build (available on sourceforge if you wanted to try it ...

LaundryPizza03 wrote: January 9th, 2026, 10:56 pm On M4 Pro, do I also modify the command to build wxWidgets?

No need. Glad to see you managed to build Golly.

This happened:

...
"_wxTreeCtrlNameStr", referenced from:
MainFrame::CreateDirControl() in wxmain.o
ld: symbol(s) not found for architecture x86_64
clang++: error: linker command failed with exit code 1 (use -v to see invocation)
make: *** [app.bin] Error 1


This looks like wxWidgets was ...

LaundryPizza03 wrote: January 8th, 2026, 10:10 pm I'm on macOS 15.7.3. If I updated to macOS 26, what should I do, since AGL is not supported on that platform?

Just remove "-framework AGL" from the EXTRALIBS_GUI setting in makefile (it's no longer needed for Golly). I'll remove it from makefile-mac in the source repo.

This error occurred while building Golly from source...

I had no problems building Golly using wxWidgets 3.3.1. When you copied gui-wx/makefile-mac to makefile did you edit the latter and change WX_RELEASE and WX_DIR? The lines should look like this:


WX_RELEASE = 3.3
WX_DIR = /your-full-path ...

LaundryPizza03 wrote: January 7th, 2026, 1:34 am EDIT: Also v 5.0 under similar circumstances. Is macOS 26 known to experience this issue?

What is macOS 26?

I get this error whenever I try to open Golly 5.0, even on Xorg. ...

Sorry, but it seems very difficult (impossible?) to create a binary that will run on all flavors of Linux. You'll have to download the source code and follow the instructions in docs/Build.html. EDIT: Or maybe just install that ...

Golly really likes to save 50+MB temporary pattern files whenever I run an infinite growth simulation for long enough. Is there a way to prevent this from happening so I don't get slowdowns?

For the particular rule in your example, use the HashLife algorithm rather than QuickLife. QuickLife ...

Impressive work -- well done!

dvgrn wrote: November 25th, 2025, 9:24 am The other Web-based HashLife implementation is https://copy.sh/life

There's also webGolly: https://golly.sourceforge.io/webapp/golly.html (which reminds me: I need to make a few changes and upload version 5.0).

However, if I copy it to the clipboard and then use File > Open Clipboard I get a dialog saying " Golly warning: The first line in blockylife.rule does not start with @RULE. 2B$.2BA10.2B.A$.2B11.2B$A12.2A! "

Yep, I can reproduce the problem on my Windows system (doesn't happen on macOS or Linux ...

Antonin Duda wrote: November 6th, 2025, 9:16 am Why does copy+pasting this rule to golly not work?

Seems to work fine on my system (Golly 5.0 on macOS). What exactly is going wrong?

Golly 5.0 is now available from sourceforge:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/golly/ ... golly-5.0/

Apart from a different version number and some minor changes to the docs, 5.0 is the same as 5.0b1.