Golly 5.1b1

[Andrew]

Golly 5.1b1 is now available for testing:

https://www.trevorrow.com/golly/golly-5 ... bit.tar.gz (for Linux, built on Mint 20)
https://www.trevorrow.com/golly/golly-5.1b1-mac.dmg (for macOS, Intel or Silicon)
https://www.trevorrow.com/golly/golly-5 ... -64bit.zip (for Windows 7+)

Changes to 5.0:

* Added a geturl command so Lua scripts can download a file from a given URL. A new script, download.lua, illustrates how it can be used.
* The getfiles command now returns nil if the given directory doesn't exist (more useful than aborting the script with an error message).
* The rule parser now allows Hensel format rules without a slash.
* Better detection and reporting of errors in the table/tree data in a .rule file.
* Fixed a bug that could result in Golly freezing or crashing if you modified an active .rule file and then did a Reset/Undo/Redo.
* Fixed a spurious warning on Windows when opening clipboard data containing a local @RULE.
* The macOS app uses less memory when running a hashlife algorithm.
* The Linux app is now built with GTK3 (see docs/Build.html for details). Also, the files panel uses desktop theme colors so should be readable in dark mode (note that the theme check is only done when the app starts up).
* Updated Lua to version 5.5.0.
* New pattern: Turmites/DragonCurve.rle

If there are no problems in this build then version 5.1 will be uploaded to sourceforge in a couple of weeks.

[NNlk05]

Quick suggestion: a way to set the RNG seed for randfills in scripts.

[Andrew]

Quick suggestion: a way to set the RNG seed for randfills in scripts.

In a Lua script you just initialize the seed with a fixed value; eg. math.randomseed(42). I assume Python supports something similar.

EDIT: I think I misunderstood. math.randomseed won't affect the C rand call used in g.randfill. You'll have to write your own routine to do random fills, which is pretty easy (see the RandomFill function in Scripts/Lua/gplus/NewCA.lua).

EDIT #2: I forgot that in Golly 5.0 we no longer use the C rand call. From Help > Changes:
Golly now uses C++11's Mersenne Twister for randomly filling a selection, rather than rand(), since rand() has a somewhat low period (about 2^31 or 2^32 on various platforms).

[Katrina]

Whenever I draw the cells are offset from the cursor. This might be fixable on my device but worst case it needs to be rebuilt or something.

Edit: Resizing the window fixes it. There is something misaligned with the cell grid (you can see it in the top part where it gets cut off).

[Andrew]

Whenever I draw the cells are offset from the cursor.

There is a gap between the edit bar and pattern window for some reason. What version of Linux are you using? You could probably avoid the problem by building Golly from source but if resizing the window fixes the problem then I'd go with that. Linux is a many headed beast -- way too many for Golly to slay.

[Katrina]

Whenever I draw the cells are offset from the cursor.

There is a gap between the edit bar and pattern window for some reason. What version of Linux are you using? You could probably avoid the problem by building Golly from source but if resizing the window fixes the problem then I'd go with that. Linux is a many headed beast -- way too many for Golly to slay.

I am on Ubuntu 26.04.1, and I recently upgraded to it from 24.04.

I also forgot to mention that I have to run `GDK_BACKEND=x11 ./golly` in the terminal whenever I want to run it (instead of clicking it on the file manager or something), due to an error that says:

Code: Select all

This program wasn't compiled with EGL support required under Wayland, either
install EGL libraries and rebuild or run it under X11 backend by setting
environment variable GDK_BACKEND=x11 before starting your program.

Maybe the X11 backend is the problem here.