ConwayLife.com

If there's one thing I miss from the old LifeLab, it's a quick "shift selection" command. Yes, there's a script for this, but really this is so basic that I'd love to have single-key "shift one cell N/E/W/S" commands available. Below is a simplified version of shift.py that moves the selection nort...

Unfortunately, this might require new algorithms altogether... Not necessarily new algorithms, but certainly a lot of new code. Golly's current support for bounded grids is just a quick hack (all done in the GUI code). I've always seen this as just a temporary solution until someone implements "nat...

I've just performed several experiments. It is surprize that Jon Bennet 1989 code only slightly modified shows the best speed for the exploding and chaotic patterns. All tests use only two adjacent cells (brick) at state 1. XLife shows the speed of the evolution about 100% and 50% faster than Golly...

If LumpsOfMuck is running Golly on Linux then lifehistory.table won't be found because the file is called LifeHistory.table and Linux (normally) uses a case-sensitive file system. Always best to use exactly the right case for rules when sharing patterns. Similarly, best to avoid using "life" -- B3/S...

I think the answer is to create a python transition function which can use golly.getgen(), and then use make-ruletree.py instead of using a rule table. That won't work I'm afraid. The transition function is not dynamically called every gen -- it is only interpreted *once* to make the .tree file, so...

... have you considered giving Golly built-in support for alternating rules? I think it's unlikely, for a couple of reasons: 1. It looks quite easy to create rule tables for exploring these rules. (I tested yours and it seems to work fine.) In fact, it should be possible to create a script that cou...

The good news is we've fixed the bug with B0-and-H rules, so Golly 2.3 will do the right thing (we hope to release it in a few weeks). The bad news is that ALL the B0-and-H patterns found by EricG and Tropylium are not really spaceships etc, so apologies for wasting your time. (I did warn you that t...

Is there a way to correctly rotate and flip patterns created for a hexagonal neighborhood in Golly? Here's a Python script that does rotation by 60 degrees (save it as something like hexrot.py): # Rotate hexagonal neighborhood pattern clockwise by 60 degrees. # Author: Andrew Trevorrow (andrew@trev...

The history mode maybe toggled by @ keypress. Will Golly team add this feature to the next release? If by history you mean the ability to show all cells that were alive, then Golly already supports this via the LifeHistory rule, or for all other rules you can use envelope.py. Although this script i...

I have folder Python27 in C: but I still don't know where is python*.dll file! ... First thing: did you download the 32-bit version of Python? Golly is a 32-bit app so it won't work with a 64-bit Python. After some googling it appears that in Windows 7 python27.dll should be located in C:\Windows\S...

On my Windows XP system python27.dll is in C:\WINDOWS\system32. If the dll is not in that location on your system then I'm guessing you're using a newer version of Windows (7?) and the Python installer puts the dll in a different location. Use Windows Explorer to do an advanced search for python*.dl...

Fastas wrote:I would like to create a variation on the game, is it under some license?

No. Just don't call it "The Game of Life" because there is a commercial board game with that name.

Which version of Perl do you have installed? Golly 2.2 requires 5.10 or later, and it has to be a 32-bit Perl. Did you download the ActiveState installer as recommended in Help > Perl Scripting? If all those conditions are true and Golly still can't run Perl scripts then what exactly is the *full* p...

It sounds like you have a pattern in the clipboard and have then selected File > Run Clipboard, but that menu item assumes the clipboard contains a *script*. Use File > Open Clipboard for pattern data.

If I'm wrong about this then show me what's in the clipboard (just the first few lines should do).

It also happens when the pattern is pasted into Golly, and therefore has no original filename or extension. Again, the "Save extended RLE" option must be unticked. ... I can't reproduce this. None of the steps I tried resulted in a "#Life 1.05" line being copied into the rle. Can you describe in mo...

Saving #CXRLE is the recommended setting? Yep (it's ticked when you first start up Golly). It's needed if you want to save positioning info or a non-zero gen count. I thought that it was deprecated; at least, someone spent a long time "removing useless #CXRLE comment lines" from the Golly CVS archi...

The above ideas should be reasonably easy to implement by making appropriate changes to the random-fill.py script available at the Golly Scripts Database . Python is an easy language to learn, and you don't need to learn a lot of its advanced features to be able to write scripts for Golly because a ...

Golly uses the info on the first (non-empty) line to determine the file format, so Life 1.05 files must begin with "#Life 1.05". Golly seems perfectly happy with the pattern posted above when this line is present. It does do something strange though: it retains this line when saving the pattern as R...

Sorry, but I don't follow you. Are you saying you have a .lif file that Golly can't load?
If so I suspect it isn't really a legal Life 1.05 file. Please post the file (or zip and attach it if really big) and I'll see what's going wrong.

Why restrict yourself to C++? Here's a simple Python script you can run from Golly to do the job: # Load a given .lif file and create a .rle file. # Author: Andrew Trevorrow (andrew@trevorrow.com), Aug 2011. import golly as g # prompt for .lif file and load it in lifname = g.opendialog("Open .lif fi...

Try compiling a 32-bit version: cc -o gfind -m32 gfind.c Now I get correct results on my 10.6 system. EDIT: I reported the problem to David Eppstein and he has fixed the code so that a 64-bit gfind also works correctly. You can get version 4.9 of gfind from his site (you might need to clear your bro...

I don't think it makes sense to use pdb with Golly because you won't be able to enter any pdb commands (you don't have access to a command line). If you want to see a call trace at a particular point in your script code, insert a line like this: raise RuntimeError("foo") If you want to see the trace...

I haven't looked at Golly to see how separate the interface is from the Life engine. If the latter is written in C or C++ ... The latter is written in C++ and is quite separate from the GUI code. All the GUI code is contained in wx* files (where wx is short for wxWidgets), so it should be reasonabl...

Also I have trouble even motivating myself to learn Golly in the first place since MCell is so much easier to use. You keep saying that but apart from MCell's GUI for rule creation you don't give any concrete examples. There's not a lot of incentive to add such a GUI to Golly -- it would have to be...

If the script is using getdir("data") to specify the location then the files should be here:

C:\Documents and Settings\your-user-name\Application Data\Golly\

I think this is normally a hidden folder so you need to turn on the appropriate Windows option to see/search those folders.