Proposed home page refresh

[otismo]

to be clear :

the position of the community seems to be that corporate logos do not belong here.

My position is why would a Corporation NOT want its LoGo implemented in CGoL ?

Cheers !

[GUYTU6J]

Pleasr stop, otismo. 差不多得了 You have gong too far and made four posts here, wchich are hardly on topic and instead should be put in your own thread.

[dvgrn]

I do like the idea of having some LifeViewer animated patterns accessible from the home page, though. The current set of sample patterns doesn't really give the right impression yet.

Hunting did complete that LeapLife timeline, so there's definitely no need for anyone else to do any work on it.

[77551enpassant]

The mobile version of the home page is broken.

vu6RFRT.png (516.4 KiB) Viewed 1945 times

[Nathaniel]

The mobile version of the home page is broken.

A fix is in the works (Macbi mentioned it earlier too). Can you let me know what browser/type of phone you're using? It works fine on all phones I have access to (all iPhones), which makes it somewhat annoying for me to test.

[77551enpassant]

I'm using an Android, with Chrome.

[77551enpassant]

The mobile home page is still broken. Also, Is there a mobile version for LifeWiki? It only shows in desktop mode for me.

[rowett]

Also, Is there a mobile version for LifeWiki? It only shows in desktop mode for me.

No I don't think so. MediaWiki says: "MediaWiki will work on many mobile devices (ie. smartphones and tablets), but it is not optimized for mobile devices."

[otismo]

Pleasr stop, otismo. 差不多得了 You have gong too far and made four posts here, wchich are hardly on topic and instead should be put in your own thread.

My apologies if I am out-of-line;

MODS please delete or move my posts if you feel they are off-topic...

Home Page is Looking Good !

Thanks !

[dvgrn]

My apologies if I am out-of-line;

MODS please delete or move my posts if you feel they are off-topic...

Home Page is Looking Good !

This particular moderator is not tempted to make any changes to this thread. I can kind of understand GUYUT6J's frustration with the corporate-logo posts in particular -- it's an unfamiliar point of view around here that it might be interesting to transfer things like corporate logos into Life patterns. If my own experience is any guide, a common response is some combination of deep misgivings and faint nausea.

On the other hand, here we are with a freshly redesigned home page, with only five patterns to explore! If otismo doesn't say out-of-the-box things occasionally, who is going to remind us about how much more LifeViewer can do?

is anyone interested in making

Life Viewer Movies ?

Oh, no, a trip down Memory Lane
For those of us who remember back to the previous millennium, Alan Hensel's website in 1999 had many more than five patterns that could be explored, from a dropdown list very similar to the current one -- and the average pattern had a whole lot more "eye candy" value than our current limited choice of 2EC/copperhead/GGG/Sir Robin/Snark loop.

Alan Hensel's website is actually still out there, and in working order in the unlikely event that anyone is both willing and able to get Java support working in a browser these days.

George Maydwell's color "Collidoscope" (from 2003, I think?) was even more jaw-dropping; he was way ahead of the curve in OCA exploration, as well as showing off Alan Hensel's pattern collection. But unfortunately his CGOLVE platform ("Color Game of Life Visual Exhibition") met the same fate as Alan Hensel's applet, due to the loss of Java support years ago. This is the Internet Archive link to CGOLVE, but it's not easy to see how awesome it used to be -- none of the actual patterns show up. There used to be half a dozen running on one page, sometimes, in all sorts of colors. Looks like you can still get the ModernCA/Author/AuthorXY zip file from the Wayback Machine, so maybe it could be got running on a desktop still, if not in a browser. (?)

I agree with otismo: home page needs some more pizazz!
Anyway: why not add some LifeViewer animations, really? We've got some good ones already that show off LifeViewer capabilities far beyond anything Alan Hensel's applet could manage. And it'd be great if people would build more of them.

For anyone who objects to the annoying "lockdown" that a waypoint script can produce in a pattern, we could either say somewhere on the homepage "Hit the Reset button to turn off animations" -- or we could just include two copies of the pattern in the dropdown, one with "ANIMATION: " before the name, and one that's just the pattern undecorated by LifeViewer commands.

[GUYTU6J]

There is also a browsable Life Pattern Catalog from Paul Callahan's page that has been equipped with LifeViewer (albeit an outdated one so many modern features especially animations are not available.)

...
I agree with otismo: home page needs some more pizazz!
Anyway: why not add some LifeViewer animations, really? We've got some good ones already that show off LifeViewer capabilities far beyond anything Alan Hensel's applet could manage. And it'd be great if people would build more of them.
...

As a start, there are some animations in the LifeWiki articles for c/5 diagonal rake and weekender distaff, and Life/Rakes/c4-sideways-rake.rle in Golly's collection.

[Nathaniel]

One minor update to the homepage today: you can now load in custom RLEs via the "rle" URL parameter, and you can optionally load a custom name via a "name" URL parameter. For example, go to https://conwaylife.com/?rle=3o&name=Blinker and see what pattern loads.

[dvgrn]

One minor update to the homepage today: you can now load in custom RLEs via the "rle" URL parameter, and you can optionally load a custom name via a "name" URL parameter. For example, go to https://conwaylife.com/?rle=3o&name=Blinker and see what pattern loads.

Wonderful -- thank you! Let me try it:

https://conwaylife.com/?rle=b!&name=Sma ... -reflector

... Darn. It didn't fill in properly based on my description. EDIT: If you can get that working as a ChatGPT-enabled feature by 131 days from now, that will be good enough.

As a more serious bug report, it appears that if the RLE is blank, the page defaults to a randomly chosen object and ignores the name parameter. It seems to work better if there's an exclamation point at the end -- just a "b" doesn't work to allow the name parameter to be applied, but "b!" does.

https://conwaylife.com/?rle=&name=Vacuum

And it looks like names that contain either spaces or underscores aren't currently working quite right:

https://conwaylife.com/?rle=b!&name=Sma ... _reflector

[Nathaniel]

Let me try it:

https://conwaylife.com/?rle=b!&name=Sma ... -reflector

... Darn. It didn't fill in properly based on my description.

I'll work on the ChatGPT auto-generate-pattern-you-describe integration over the next week or so.

As a more serious bug report, it appears that if the RLE is blank, the page defaults to a randomly chosen object and ignores the name parameter. It seems to work better if there's an exclamation point at the end -- just a "b" doesn't work to allow the name parameter to be applied, but "b!" does.

https://conwaylife.com/?rle=&name=Vacuum

And it looks like names that contain either spaces or underscores aren't currently working quite right:

https://conwaylife.com/?rle=b!&name=Sma ... _reflector

Fixed spaces/underscores/dashes in names. I have also fixed "b" not working as an RLE, but just "rle=" (with nothing after "=") being treated the same as the default homepage seems like a feature to me, not a bug (or at least a bug whose bugginess I can't imagine ever actually causing a problem).

[dvgrn]

The first bug that comes up in a click-through of the revised omniperiodicity paper, besides the missing $ in "$rats", is an important period that comes up missing from "42P10.3". Is that some kind of URL-encoding hiccup causing non-alphanumeric characters to be discarded? Apostrophes are also going missing, as in "Buckinghams p13".

The other thing that came up was a pattern called "An infinite p19 oscillator":

Code: Select all

x = 19, y = 19, rule = B3/S23:T19,19
bo$2bo$3o3$5bo$6b2o$5b2o3$11bo$9bobo$10b2o3$14bobo$15b2o$15bo!
[[ THEME Book ]]

If it's workable, it might be nice to have a non-home-page implementation of this same functionality, with additional "rule" and "viewerconfig" parameters (to allow for non-Life patterns and bounded grids in the "rule" case, and custom LifeViewer sizes and themes and so on and so forth in the "viewerconfig" case.)

[rowett]

I've added similar functionality to the LifeViewer home page.

Supports:

• rle - to define the pattern
• rule - to specify the rule (defaults to B3/S23 if not specified)
• name - to specify the name (creates a #N line in the pattern header)
• viewerconfig - to specify script command section

Examples:

rle
https://lazyslug.com/lifeviewer?rle=o$obo$2o!


rle and name
https://lazyslug.com/lifeviewer?rle=o$obo$2o!&name=Glider


rle and rule
https://lazyslug.com/lifeviewer?rle=o$obo$2o!&rule=LifeSuper


rle and viewerconfig
https://lazyslug.com/lifeviewer?rle=o$obo$2o!&viewerconfig=THEME Book GRID


rle, rule, name and viewerconfig
https://lazyslug.com/lifeviewer?rle=o$obo$2o!&rule=LifeHistory:T30,20&name=Glider_on Bounded-Grid!&viewerconfig=AUTOSTART


Edit 1:

• viewerconfig no longer needs [[ and ]] specified. They are added automatically.

Edit 2:

• rle will now add the final ! if not specified.
• rule, name and viewerconfig are ignored unless rle is specified.

Edit 3:

• Any control characters are now removed from all parameters.
• Any script delimiters ([[ and ]]) are now removed from rle, rule and name.
• Any newlines are removed from name and rule definitions.
• rle is truncated at the first ! character found.

Edit 4:

• Now live!