I had to give it a nudge by changing resolution. (Can't remember if I hit the fullscreen button or turned my phone) Looks like the initial state is an unstable equilibrium, but introducing a local deviation by by changing the size of the buffer knocks it out of that equilibrium and makes it break down in interesting ways.
Cellular automata is a simulation where you have a lattice of cells (usually in a grid corresponding to pixels, but not always) & each cell gets updated according to a simple rule set.
My current project had a branch that explored using a CA for texture generation, but it ran into enough issues that in the end I went back to my original approach.
I worked on a demo-scene-esque game of life thing back in uni that I always wanted to go back & revisit. I'd need to relearn a bunch of stuff though. It comes from the days of gl_begingl_end.
Yeah, I was exploring using cellular automata for a magic system in a game at one point, but had a real challenge making it intuitive enough for the player to be able to use it deliberately, and understand what was happening. The difference of one cell or one simulation step can completely change the outcome.
The chaos that makes the automata so fascinating to watch also makes them seemingly-random and capricious in game mechanical contexts.
I had always thought a museum exhibit game would be a great project. Like how there's gliders, beacons, repeaters, etc; I thought a pokemon - sort of gotta find them all thing would be neat.
I made an installation game with the game of life once - it was my undergraduate thesis project, in using games for math education.
For the end of year showcase, I set up a projector that projected the game onto a plinth where the user could interact with it, and as the patterns grew they'd spill off the plinth onto the floor around it. It was a pretty nifty effect. 😁
It was fun to build and fiddle with. Didn't handle large patterns super well (it was made in Flash), but it was enough to entertain the younger visitors. 😊
No, but I used to sorta program Lua with Roblox. But, I didn’t understand the concept of actually learning how to code very well, so it was pretty bad.
I've been trying to push the "content related" stuff out of the software and into the content files. I feel we're at a point where trivial stuff should be done through the content files rather than through adding more code to the software...
Well the code has to go somewhere but I'd rather push some of this in our environment files... That's a giant leap though, as it introduces yet another language.
@Tyyppi_77 Did you use a wrapper for it, or you went wild and used the API directly?
user92578
I looked a bit into using just the C API but it seemed like a pain and a half to manage or even write wrappers for myself, so the little code I have uses "sol"
Yeah, thanks, that's what I'm concluding too. I'll be looking at how it works with the c api, but will end up using Sol if I ever decide to go ahead with it.
Thanks!
user92578
Already like function calling etc becomes such a pain when you have to manage the stack yourself, it definitely did not seem like something I wanted to do
