Yes, I've been having the same problem! Had decided to take an incremental approach until clarity arrives.Sokwe wrote:As I've said, I'm not satisfied with Golly's current pattern collection. Annoyingly, I can't seem to determine what set of patterns would satisfy me...
For 3.0 I added a few patterns, like Jormungant's high-bandwidth telegraph, that represent really modern Life technology. And the ancient and embarrassing Herschel conduit collection has finally been replaced, but that was the only stamp collection I had time to tackle.
I'll probably go after reflectors.rle and reflectors2.rle next, along with blockish-and-blockic-seeds.rle in the Syntheses folder which is also impressively out of date ... but in point of fact, just about every pattern in Syntheses except for two-glider-collisions.rle could probably be replaced by something more recent and much more impressive.
In general it seems as if the pattern collection has been gravitating toward stamp collections rather than individual patterns -- it just doesn't seem like there's room any more for single random examples of spaceships, oscillators, etc.
The Online Archives seem like a good starting point for some kind of organized downloadable Grand Collection of Collections, if the problem of visibility can be solved somehow.
I'd like to add a new collection that anyone can make donations to, along the lines of the old conwaylife.com patterns collection before it got difficult to support that kind of thing there. It would be good if the collection system forced, or strongly suggested, the addition of attribution info and a detailed description along with the pattern.
It's possible for the collection point for this hypothetical public archive to be a forum thread, I suppose, but it would be helpful if the 100K attachment limit for non-admins didn't apply there.
I wonder if it would work to use the new Golly overlay to build a pattern library maintenance system -- patterns would get downloaded directly into a subfolder in the pattern folder, check marks would appear for collections that have already been downloaded, and maybe there could be some kind of scrollable treeview so it's easy to see in detail what's available...? The overlay is yet another thing that I haven't had time to play around with nearly enough yet.
It would be nice if the same system could also manage uploads to the public archive. But if there isn't someone committed to overseeing a feature like that, it could easily become a very big mess. In practice I almost like the forum-thread collection method better. Patterns will have to meet at least a minimum standard -- i.e., that the maintainer of the thread thinks it's worth taking the time to add the contributions to an archive.