wirehead wrote: February 19th, 2024, 10:19 pm
Hi James -- welcome to these here forums!
One piece of feedback -- the gesture to place cells with the brush (right click) is a bit counter-intuitive -- and a bit of an odd choice at that considering that left click doesn't do anything. The other major programs (Golly, LifeViewer) use left click to place cells and there hasn't been any complaint -- but if you prefer right click, you could always add a setting to allow the user to choose.
Also, as to the "multiple slices" display feature -- I think Chris Rowett beat you to the punch with the
"layers" feature in LifeViewer, but then again, LifeViewer is a pure Javascript tool (no WASM) and doesn't have the performance of something like Golly. If you are able to combine the power of Golly (consider adding hashlife if you don't have it already) with this neat history layers effect, that would be
awesome!! Keep up the good work!
Hi wirehead, thanks for the warm welcome, and for your feedback!
At the moment, left click is used to pan across the space by clicking and dragging. I'd always considered that the primary interaction, so went with right click for the brush. But it would be trivial to make this configurable
Slice of Life's (SoL) engine is my own Hashlife implementation written in C, and is designed to handle large populations. For example, here is SoL running the
Quest for Tetris Processor with 200 history layers at 32,768 generations per tick:
- sol_capture_tetris2.png (185.34 KiB) Viewed 7315 times
Each square you can see above is a 2048x2048 OTCA metapixel.
I also just wanted to add a note about the "future" time slices, since they behave a little differently to the "past". The future slices show how the present slice will evolve, and will be updated if you make changes to the "present". For example, you could use it to align Glider Guns like so:
- sol_capture_future_slices.png (135.3 KiB) Viewed 7315 times
Placing the brush will always update the future slices, but if you don't want to commit to placing the brush in that spot, you can turn on the "Preview future on hover" option on the "Brush" tab. This will show you a preview of how the future will be affected if you
were to place the brush at the location you are hovering over. Moving the brush will revert your change and you can readjust.
Anyway, thanks again to everyone who's trying this out, I really appreciate it!
James
