ConwayLife.com

dvgrn wrote:

rowett wrote: I'm debating also adding average density since I've seen it discussed recently. Is it worth it or should we just release the current build?

I'm okay with either. How would you determine the period? Or would you just keep a running average and figure it wouldn't change much after a while, if the pattern is an oscillator?

Just keep a running average.

An odd flickering shows up mostly during the two-second PAUSE, with build 250, and mostly when the ZOOM isn't an integer. The problem almost goes away with ZOOM -2, but not quite... I think this is maybe the same thing that got fixed with a more recent build, just before my G4G talk -- but might as well mention it here just in case.

dvgrn wrote:An odd flickering shows up mostly during the two-second PAUSE, with build 250...

Okay, I'm seeing enough slightly weird behavior from Build 250, between the forums and the LifeWiki, that I should really get serious about running through some regression testing and then getting Nathaniel to upload Build 259+.

So... there a Build 260 coming along that I should wait for, or should I just go ahead and double-check Build 259?

dvgrn wrote:So... there a Build 260 coming along that I should wait for, or should I just go ahead and double-check Build 259?

I'm not working on LifeViewer at the moment so 259 is probably good for testing. It's certainly got all the latest animation fixes in it.
Currently in Japan on vacation - and working on Golly 3D in my spare time

rowett wrote:

dvgrn wrote:So... there a Build 260 coming along that I should wait for, or should I just go ahead and double-check Build 259?

I'm not working on LifeViewer at the moment so 259 is probably good for testing. It's certainly got all the latest animation fixes in it.
Currently in Japan on vacation - and working on Golly 3D in my spare time ;)

Sounds good. Have fun, and I hope you're somewhere not too much affected by the heat wave! And if you just happen to see an American trumpet player named James Barrett, in Osaka or Kansai or wherever he's playing these days, tell him I said hi:

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/ ... 1DG-tJKhPZ

-- Oh, and to make things official: could you copy build 259 to the release folder?

(If I remember right, the idea was that we'd always send Nathaniel the same link when it was time to update conwaylife.com. That way if he doesn't get around to doing the upload right away, small last-minute fixes could sneak in under the wire without a corrected link having to be sent. Also, sometime before we get into four-digit build numbers, maybe Nathaniel will have gotten tired of doing things manually and set up a monitoring system that automatically uploads from the release folder immediately, whenever a change shows up, every hour or something.)

dvgrn wrote:I hope you're somewhere not too much affected by the heat wave!

Depends how much you like 100F I guess. Us Brits melt at about 90F

dvgrn wrote:And if you just happen to see an American trumpet player named James Barrett, in Osaka or Kansai or wherever he's playing these days, tell him I said hi

Certainly will - love a bit of jazz.

dvgrn wrote:Oh, and to make things official: could you copy build 259 to the release folder?

Yes but I'm not anywhere I can do that until Sunday.

rowett wrote:Yes but I'm not anywhere I can do that until Sunday.

Build 259 is now in the release folder.

Are we good to go with Build 259?

I'm finishing some performance work on Golly rendering and then I may even get back to LTL on LifeViewer.

No, you're right, I don't believe it either.

Here's the increasingly ancient backlog:

1. LifeViewer:
   • LTL support
   • 3D support
2. lifeviewer.lua
   • Waypoint system

rowett wrote:Are we good to go with Build 259?

I'm finishing some performance work on Golly rendering and then I may even get back to LTL on LifeViewer...

Yes, looks good to me. I'm not likely to get much more testing done in the next couple of weeks -- I'm mostly at a cabin in the Adirondacks with limited electricity and no connectivity.

Huh, Discord is rapidly getting way ahead of the forums in terms of custom rule support (but don't worry, LifeViewer is still way ahead in just about every other category!)

ConwayLife Lounge Discordians are now able to upload to Discord not only multistate rule tables that can be run with RuleLoader, but also scripts that implement custom rule families by generating a rule table in response to a rule string in a pattern header.

I seem to recall there was some idea of looking through the current forum thread for a posted rule table definition, or something like that -- but that would mean adding more general rule table support. Did that feature ever actually get on the To-Do list (even if rather far down) or was it always just speculation?

In other news, I still haven't found anything particularly wrong with Build 259, but I also still haven't looked very hard. Have been getting all kinds of other exciting things done by avoiding that task. How about you?

EDIT: I asked Nathaniel to roll out Build 259 yesterday morning, and have been watching for signs of unexpected problems. Looks good so far!

dvgrn wrote:Huh, Discord is rapidly getting way ahead of the forums in terms of custom rule support (but don't worry, LifeViewer is still way ahead in just about every other category!)

Yep it uses bgolly for the backend so it supports everything Golly does.

dvgrn wrote:ConwayLife Lounge Discordians are now able to upload to Discord not only multistate rule tables that can be run with RuleLoader, but also scripts that implement custom rule families by generating a rule table in response to a rule string in a pattern header.

Very nice.

dvgrn wrote:I seem to recall there was some idea of looking through the current forum thread for a posted rule table definition, or something like that -- but that would mean adding more general rule table support. Did that feature ever actually get on the To-Do list (even if rather far down) or was it always just speculation?

Yes this was where the Molly discussions started. From memory I'd refused to do multistate in LifeViewer (other than LifeHistory, and then Generations, and one day LTL, but apart from that...) and so Andrew built Molly. The intention was if LifeViewer didn't support a rule it would say so and create a link to Molly.
I did the Molly integration work in LifeViewer (which was trivial) but it then required a script to run on the forum to scan posts and build a RuleTable repository. I guess Nathaniel would have needed to do that but the project got mothballed (not sure why - probably more interesting things to work on).

dvgrn wrote:In other news, I still haven't found anything particularly wrong with Build 259, but I also still haven't looked very hard. Have been getting all kinds of other exciting things done by avoiding that task. How about you?

I've been mostly optimizing the Golly Overlay recently. No idea why since I think only Andrew and I have ever used it. Plus I'm not sure how many people have ever touched 3d.lua either (which by the way is now running super fast).

dvgrn wrote:EDIT: I asked Nathaniel to roll out Build 259 yesterday morning, and have been watching for signs of unexpected problems. Looks good so far!

Hurrah!

rowett wrote:I've been mostly optimizing the Golly Overlay recently. No idea why since I think only Andrew and I have ever used it.

I'm afraid that may be true, except for a trial script or two that I wrote a while back. But don't worry, it won't be true for too much longer. The overlay makes possible a huge number of amazing editing and searching tools ... that I just haven't quite gotten around to putting together yet. They seem to be on my version of your long-term To-Do list.

Plus I'm not sure how many people have ever touched 3d.lua either (which by the way is now running super fast).

There's definitely been some interest in 3d.lua, though it doesn't seem to have gotten people going posting 3D patterns in the same way that isotropic rules spawned a whole new subculture. Not yet, anyway. It might just need someone to come up with some really irresistible new discoveries.

A 3D universal constructor would certainly be interesting -- basically a 3D printer implemented in a a (two-state?) CA. But that would need 3D hashlife and a much larger grid, I think.

dvgrn wrote:A 3D universal constructor would certainly be interesting -- basically a 3D printer implemented in a a (two-state?) CA. But that would need 3D hashlife and a much larger grid, I think.

Almost certainly.

Currently 3D.lua only supports up to a 100x100x100 cube (1 million cells) and with a cube full of cells the next generation calculation takes around 35ms on my Windows desktop machine (core i7-2600K @ 4.3GHz).

The algo will support a 256x256x256 cube (16.7 million cells - there's things going on with unsigned bytes for speed). In this case with a cube full of cells the next generation calculation takes around 700ms.

dvgrn wrote:I seem to recall there was some idea of looking through the current forum thread for a posted rule table definition, or something like that -- but that would mean adding more general rule table support. Did that feature ever actually get on the To-Do list (even if rather far down) or was it always just speculation?

In fact here is the end of the thread that discussed this.

I guess maybe Build 259 isn't quite perfect after all. I just put in an animation for half-bakery reaction, and there's a strange flicker when it hits the LOOP stage, that I don't seem to remember. Am I doing something silly with the waypoints that I'm just not seeing, as usual?

There are also still some odd speed changes in the later part of the slow-salvo animation for 2-engine Cordership. It's definitely not as bad as it was in Build 250, but if you have any ideas about how to improve that waypoint script, please let me know (or edit the viewerconfig, if that's all that's needed).

dvgrn wrote:I guess maybe Build 259 isn't quite perfect after all. I just put in an animation for half-bakery reaction, and there's a strange flicker when it hits the LOOP stage, that I don't seem to remember. Am I doing something silly with the waypoints that I'm just not seeing, as usual?

It was a bug which I've just fixed.

dvgrn wrote:There are also still some odd speed changes in the later part of the slow-salvo animation for 2-engine Cordership. It's definitely not as bad as it was in Build 250, but if you have any ideas about how to improve that waypoint script, please let me know (or edit the viewerconfig, if that's all that's needed).

Still looking at this one. Suspect it's a bug since the waypoint code hurts my brain...

Nathaniel,
Would it be possible to add the following to the <head> section of each page here on the Forums:
No need to upload a new LifeViewer version yet.

rowett wrote:Nathaniel,
Would it be possible to add the following to the <head> section of each page here on the Forums:

Done, sorry for the delay.

Nathaniel wrote:Done, sorry for the delay.

Excellent - many thanks!

I've recently done some more work on LTL for LifeViewer. There's a chance it'll be complete in 2018.

With that in mind I've started looking at isotropic non-totalistic hex notation support (for both LifeViewer and Golly). Is the referenced article the accepted syntax?

rowett wrote:I've recently done some more work on LTL for LifeViewer. There's a chance it'll be complete in 2018.

With that in mind I've started looking at isotropic non-totalistic hex notation support (for both LifeViewer and Golly). Is the referenced article the accepted syntax?

As far as I know, yes. I've never paid any attention to hex rules, so I don't really know anything for sure.

Mostly it would just be good to match up with whatever Catagolue ends up supporting, but it looks like Adam has only gotten as far as handling outer-totalistic hex rules so far. Maybe coordinate with Adam directly? I see I forwarded his email address to you on November 6.

Please ensure you are sitting down before reading further.

Preliminary LifeViewer LTL support is here!

Still to do:

• Performance optimization
• Bounded grid support
• Patterns hitting grid boundary handling

rowett wrote:Please ensure you are sitting down before reading further.

Preliminary LifeViewer LTL support is here!

Sure looks good so far!

I wasn't really surprised, though. Something was bound to come along eventually that you wanted to avoid more than you wanted to avoid LTL. (Is it the isotropic hex-neighborhood headache, or something else? Lifeviewer.lua, maybe?
It keeps getting more and more difficult to do a complete port to Lua, or even a good self-contained subset of LifeViewer functionality ...)

Sounds like I should maybe not try too hard to break LTL functionality yet, until the bounded-grid support shows up. I'll just see if I can find any basic rule syntax that gets interpreted wrong, and stuff like that.

This version adds bounded grid support. Probably a good one to test.

Note it will crash if the patterns are too big or try and escape too far. I'll fix that soon.

Build 260 is now available on the lazyslug server

Enhancements is this build:

• added support for Larger than Life (LtL) rules - test
  • supports Moore, von Neumann and Circular neighborhoods
  • maximum range of 500 cells (though performance is not optimized for this yet)
• UI now has a button in the menu to toggle hex display
• Help information now shows neighborhood range when greater than 1
• meta "limit" setting default is now false, not true (for easier web page integration)

Fixes in this build:

• non-totalistic rules without digits were not being marked as invalid
• LOOP with Waypoints or AutoFit was not resetting the camera on reset
• fixed a potential crash when reading meta settings
• displayed XY location was incorrect after grid growth
• canonical form of MAP rules with Generations now adds the generations
• label UI controls under active controls were receiving clicks (which prevented the active control from working)

This build is now feature complete for LtL. If it passes testing we should probably release it into the wild to see what happens. I will be doing more work on LtL performance but I believe it's good enough for LifeViewer sized patterns.