Golly 2.8 will support non-totalistic rules

[p46beth]

Okay, since I am dumb and can't figure it out: what is the syntax for defining non-outer-totalistic rules?

[Rocknlol]

Okay, since I am dumb and can't figure it out: what is the syntax for defining non-outer-totalistic rules?

Every unique configuration of cells is assigned a letter based on this table, which then can be added to or subtracted from normal life-like rules. For example B3/S234c is identical to Life except that a cell also survives if there are live cells on all of its corners. B3-e/S23 is identical to Life except that a dead cell is not born if the three live cells surrounding it are all orthogonally adjacent to it.

[muzik]

Got 2.8 on the family laptop a few days back for transferring the infinite conduit (my own computer is still not hooked up to the Internet yet). Noticed that most of the patterns suggested here haven't been added?

Will this be changed in the next patch or?

[dvgrn]

Got 2.8 on the family laptop a few days back for transferring the infinite conduit (my own computer is still not hooked up to the Internet yet). Noticed that most of the patterns suggested here haven't been added?

Will this be changed in the next patch or?

A few more patterns will no doubt get added to the Non-Totalistic folder and its subfolders as time goes on. However, the sample patterns that ship with Golly are generally biased toward complex engineered patterns, spaceship stamp collections, and Patterns That Do Very Unusual Things (TM).

I was reasonably happy with Andrew's picks for a small random-ish subset of isotropic-rule patterns to check in to the base collection. Non-totalistic space is so huge that we'll never even manage to get a representative collection, without making Golly's ZIP file larger than we want it to be.

That said -- huge collections of patterns are always welcome! We can find a place for them to live as separate optional downloads, in Help > Online Archives. Patterns can be added to subcategories, like the Very Large Patterns archive, between Golly releases. If there's any interest in expanding the library of pattern collections available to Golly users, maybe we could add a "User-Contributed Collections" section to the Online Archives page. ZIP files could then be added to that subcategory at any time, with no need for a new Golly release every time.

I'm planning to add Emmanuel Sapin's large isotropic-rule gun collection to the Online Archives at some point, along with the latest versions of the Elementary Conduits Collection and the H-to-G and H-to-Gn collections. And Jormungant's High-Bandwidth Telegraph and loafer banner in Very Large Patterns, and so on. I think gmc_nxtman's H-to-H collection should actually get checked in to Golly's base collection, though, replacing the wildly out of date Herschel-conduit stamp collection that's in there now.

Other suggestions for patterns to be added are always very welcome (but of course I may take the suggestions, or I may arbitrarily decide not to...) I do like the idea of a "User-Contributed Collections" area somewere, maybe on conwaylife.com, where new ZIP files would be accepted more or less by default, and deleted only if they were found to be spammish.