Adding diagonal glide symmetry in JLS

[dexter1]

Some time ago i have made a modification to the JLS source code to search for diagonal glide-symmetric ships. The git repository is at https://github.com/frankeverdij/JLSsource in the glide_code branch.

You can build this version yourself by obtaining a Java Development Kit: There is a compile.txt file with a one-liner command which can be used to build the jar file. There might be some deprecated warnings popping up, but they can be ignored for now.

Once built, go to "Properties->Edit field" and define a square grid. For the depth value use half the numerical value of the speed of the glide symmetric spaceship, e.g. for c/4 use 2 generations. Set the symmetry to "none".
In the Tab "Tiling/Translation" select either "Glide Diagonal Forward" for ships moving NorthEast or "Glide Diagonal Backward" for NorthWest movement. Keep all translations and shifts at 0.

glide6.png (88.32 KiB) Viewed 2843 times

Because of the current hackish implementation, the border area is not correctly flipped and translated, so it is best to create a zero border around the search area. Set up the search direction to "diagonal" and create a pattern for a ship search heading NorthWest, according to the left part of the next image.
After about 10~15 seconds the program should find the (only one) glide symmetric ship 45P4H1V1, seen on the right part of this image:

glide5.png (35.89 KiB) Viewed 2843 times

I hope that my explanation will encourage people to try out this version. Any advice or fixes to the java code to make it better* are most welcome, since java is not my forte.

* (i.e. fixing border issues and better integration in the GUI by allowing translations after a diagonal flip, so we don't need the new options anymore)