ConwayLife.com

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.

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

NNlk05 wrote: Today, 12:06 am 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).