ConwayLife.com

Hey there!

I'm new here but I wanted to let you all know I launched a new Game of Life simulator on itch.io.
You can check it out for free here: https://iamsyko.itch.io/cellular-automa ... me-of-life

It includes all patterns from the lexicon so thank you all who have maintained it and contributed to it. I hope I credited you all properly.

And of course, all feedback is welcome!

Cheers!

Nice! Haven't actually downloaded the game yet, but I watched the trailer. I really like the animation effect of pegs or checkerboard squares moving up and down in the third dimension (and changing color) to signal ON vs. OFF.

I'd love to see more extended videos of Life patterns along these lines, with 3D zooming and panning -- maybe with waypoint scripts and labels along the lines of LifeViewer scripting, while I'm wishing for things. Golly is a great tool for running Life patterns quickly, but for presentation purposes and especially for making videos, it's a huge improvement to be able to have smooth camera motions and views from different angles in three dimensions.

The Life Lexicon is a good starting point for a pattern collection, but it's very limited; it's a "dictionary" format meant more for looking up the meanings of terms than for showcasing the best known Life patterns. Some kind of carefully chosen subset of the LifeWiki all.zip pattern collection might be an idea worth investigating.

There are also much older, "classic" collections of small to medium-sized patterns, like Alan Hensel's "lifebc" and "lifep". But most of those were collected a couple of decades ago. Golly's current pattern collection skews toward larger patterns that probably aren't so workable for a project like this.

We haven't really had a "best of" collection just for recent small-to-medium-sized discoveries for quite a few years now, with a few exceptions in particular areas, like hotdogPi's updated oscillator collection -- which would be a nice collection to explore with this 3D/Blender approach!

Thanks for checking it out!

But yeah good points. I basically 'dumped' the lexicon there not really thinking about it. A different collection might work better indeed for this kind of thing. Especially, since I have a "common" category, which is not really about what's common but I just wanted to include a smaller collection of various patterns to show what is possible with a small number of cells for those who are not familiar with Game of Life at all.

Cheers!