dvgrn wrote: November 25th, 2025, 9:24 am
Very interesting! I've never seen that "Future" effect before, where the third dimension gives you a preview of what's coming rather than showing what already happened...
Hi dvgrn, thank you so much for your comments, and for taking the time to write such a thoughtful review - it means a lot
Re: future slices - thanks! There's a trick you can do with those. If you have a pattern brush enabled and turn on "Preview future on hover" it will update the future slices every time you hold the pattern still to show you how the future would be affected if you were to place the pattern there. It's pretty cool (but I'm biased).
That's a really good point about having a "showcase" library - I'll definitely add that. Suggestions for good showcase patterns would be very welcome - do you think it's worth a separate thread for that? I'd love to get some thoughts from folks here on some good patterns for the 3D demo as well. In the meantime I'll certainly add the "leaf bug" and "spacefiller synthesis" patterns, as well as looking at the Golly bundle - thanks
As for the pattern previews simulating using the wrong rules... Yeah, I know
The issue is actually worse than that, since at the moment it just uses whatever rules the engine is currently set to, so I need to rethink the way this works...
Re: shrinking spaceships in preview: this one I'm going to defend a bit. If the camera just tracks the pattern it becomes quite hard to tell that the spaceship is actually moving - it just kind of wiggles in place. For this reason the preview renderer preserves the camera centre to make locomotion obvious. Certainly open to better ways to achieve this, though!
Re: too many little patterns: that's a fair point, I suppose I was keen to keep the smaller "vocabulary" patterns since any pattern can be used as a brush, so wanted to keep them all in case they are useful. Still though, I'll take your advice and perhaps have some default filtering so you don't see those patterns unless you really want to.
Thank you so much again for such a thoughtful review!
Andrew wrote: November 25th, 2025, 6:07 pm
Impressive work -- well done!
Thank you so much Andrew - I really appreciate that!
And yes, mustn't forget WebGolly!
