ConwayLife.com

LifeViewer used to be so that if one marked cells in a pattern in LifeHistory that was not on generation zero then went back to a generation before one had set those cells to a marked state (either using step back or reset), the cells that one had marked would remain marked, but that is no longer the case. I would like for this feature to be restored because I found it useful for marking conduit outputs.

bubblegum wrote: June 3rd, 2021, 7:02 pm

Sorry, I don't get it.

It's xkcd.

ihatecorderships wrote: June 4th, 2021, 12:09 amSorry, I don't get it.

The joke is that the "feature" here is quite obviously useless and awful, and it makes no sense for someone to use that feature in any way: before seeing the comic, how would you have imagined using said feature in a workflow? The specific example is also very ridiculous.

However, I do not think that retroactive marking is such a feature (it reminds me of when you make edits in Golly but you forget you aren't in generation 0 and so you reset and lose the edits). I think it could certainly be useful (not to me, but to people who edit conduits in LifeViewer).

However, I doubt that it merits a high priority on the overlord of LifeViewer's to-do-list or even its own thread.

actually, it was a bug, which i got irritated at and asked for it to be fixed

Actually it was just an unfinished implementation. When I added the Step Back feature many moons ago I never got round to having it cope with the LifeHistory extra states. It festered on the backlog for a long time since there always appeared to be more valuable or interesting things to implement.

As to the original request: I'll add it to the backlog...

Your friendly overlord of LifeViewer's to-do-list.