That is a pretty fun puzzle game, actually. I'm starting to get excited about this.
As much as I love python, and painful as I have found Android development, a mobile application is really the way to go with this if we actually want people to play it. Though I suppose we could do html5 (like this)... Let's do some digging around and see if there is some open source implementation of GoL we might be able to extend...
*Pokes*
I was thinking of something similar, but with a different game system.
Any meaningful progress made on this idea yet?
When will a 2x2 gun be discovered...?
Guess what Chuck Norris did when he heard about Conway's game of life? He built a replicator.
Does LongLife have spaceships?
My main problem with my first ideas were (I wasn't finding solutions for all of them which was the reason I stopped working on it for a long time):
- The instability of the whole thing. I misplaced cell can ruin everything, and it normally makes no difference if you misspace/mistime by 1 square/generation or by 50, which isn't a good sign. Some forms of macros, together with modified rules could solve some parts of it but the main problem isn't that easy to solve. Playing on multiple layers where one is the macro-world which looks like a standard game and cells as microworld in specific situations (combat etc.) would be too much effort/ too counter-intuitive to play imho. Same goes for implementing more dimensions which can produce stability, but it would be impossible to not overlook something then...
- The time flow (generation by generation): Because of the instability, sometimes you need to build large constructs in one generation, which would be hard to do without some kind of pausing function. Pausing has disadvantages, too. Not as easy to handle all in all
An implementation of a similar idea to this has been developed by Drew Blaisdell.
Conway's Multiplayer Game of Life (Conway) is a real-time, persistent, multiplayer version of Conway's Game of Life.
An instance of the multiplayer game is available at http://lifecompetes.com and source code is at https://github.com/drewblaisdell/conway I found it fun for a short while, but I found it less enjoyable than I expected, perhaps because there is a lack of feedback which visualizes the interaction with other players.
Perhaps this will give you some further inspiration for your own games.
The 5S project (Smallest Spaceships Supporting Specific Speeds) is now maintained by AforAmpere. The latest collection is hosted on GitHub and contains well over 1,000,000 spaceships.
Semi-active here - recovering from a severe case of LWTDS.
@wildmyron: I like the idea of an infinite grid and unlimited building space, both of which make the game much simpler and are in the model you showed. First, unlimited building space makes it possible to build complex defense mechanisms without "fighting cells" and makes the game more strategic, and an infinite grid makes the game much less chaotic (i.e. a stray glider can easily delete engineered patterns in a finite grid). As an earlier post said, though, this is not the first attempt to make a game based on CGoL. Both Immigration and QuadLife (lifecolor in Golly) are earlier attempts to makes a game based on CGoL, though people got bored with playing both of them.
@Chesstiger2612: Perhaps the different cell types can have all the rules in Alan Hensel's notation save explosive rules, so as to help research on cellular automata.
