So how many and which patterns should be included in the list? If the list is a simple drop-down, then it should be fairly short. The one pattern I would insist on including is the Gosper glider gun.
Why not? I'm not disputing this, I just never do CGoL on my phone so I have no perspective. In general, I think viewing Life in action is by far the best starting experience.
How much work would it to be to include the most recent moderate to major discovery (so 32P21 now) and change it every few days?
This is something that I could integrate with the wiki, so that the patterns are pulled from <some page on the wiki, in some format>. However, before I go to the trouble of coding that up: is that something that people would want? Or is the front page better-suited to a relatively small and stable component of, say, 15-ish super-important patterns, that maybe gets updated once per year after pattern-of-the-year results are announced?
I didn't put it in since one of the goals of this iteration of the front page is to keep things "simple", and a textbox with a bunch of RLE gobbledegook isn't simple. However, I could maybe integrate this with the drop-down pattern selector: the first (or last?) item in the drop-down could be something like "Custom RLE", which makes the textbox appear when selected?
I would prefer a focus on patterns that are demonstrative of what's possible in Life, rather than patterns that are new. The way I see it, the home page should be an introduction for people who don't know much about Life. Anyone who would be primarily interested in the newest discoveries will probably already know where to find them and how to view them.
If the "integrate with wiki" route is chosen, maybe one model could be that all of the relevant patterns could be stored as pages likeSokwe wrote: ↑February 12th, 2022, 1:30 amI would prefer a focus on patterns that are demonstrative of what's possible in Life, rather than patterns that are new. The way I see it, the home page should be an introduction for people who don't know much about Life. Anyone who would be primarily interested in the newest discoveries will probably already know where to find them and how to view them.
I have made this integration now (but did it slightly differently than was proposed, as it's faster to pull just a single page from the wiki rather than a whole bunch).dvgrn wrote: ↑February 12th, 2022, 8:10 amIf the "integrate with wiki" route is chosen, maybe one model could be that all of the relevant patterns could be stored as pages like
RLE:Homepagepattern1
RLE:Homepagepattern2
RLE:Homepagepattern3
with each page giving the name and attribution and any comments as usual, with #N, #O, and #C comments respectively.
1) There isn't a particularly good reason for the RLE headers being separated from the rest of the RLE -- it's mostly a result of me being lazy and wanting to avoid encoding/decoding issues. I want the content of that page to be as whitespace-agnostic as possible, since it's decoded from MediaWiki to a JSON array in PHP, which is then passed through Javascript into LifeViewer's <textarea>. A linebreak is required once it makes it to the very end of that trail (i.e., in the <textarea>), so having the RLE header separate from the RLE itself makes it easier for my script to force that linebreak to be there.
I'd prefer a button or link below the viewer entitled "Show Advanced Options" that would present such a text box.Nathaniel wrote: ↑February 11th, 2022, 10:26 pmI didn't put it in since one of the goals of this iteration of the front page is to keep things "simple", and a textbox with a bunch of RLE gobbledegook isn't simple. However, I could maybe integrate this with the drop-down pattern selector: the first (or last?) item in the drop-down could be something like "Custom RLE", which makes the textbox appear when selected?
Both changed/fixed now.
That's doable -- I'll try to get that done later today.
If I have chosen a preset pattern, say copperhead, then clicking the button will not only change the title from Current Pattern: Copperhead to Current Pattern: Custom, but also replace the copperhead info with "You can enter the RLE code for any pattern that you wish to view below", both of which are not reversible by clicking the button again. Can it be changed to restore the title and info as well as hide the codebox?
Code: Select all
x = 21, y = 2, rule = B3/S23:T24,0
bo5bo5bo5bo$3o3b3o3b3o3b3o!I’ve changed those functions so they now download the images rather than open them in a new tab.
