
Strategic Game of Life - basicallydan
https://thomashunter.name/games/strategic-game-of-life/
======
tripzilch
I love it!

Please create more puzzles/levels.

And please please try to improve the UI:

\- I find "click to toggle" somewhat annoying. Maybe try "click to set",
"ctrl-click to unset"?

\- A light-grey grid background would make it easier to align shapes.

\- Similarly, showing the changing coordinates on mousemove would also help
with alignment.

\- Highlighting the current grid square under the cursor allows for more
confident placement of cells.

\- It'd be nice if the canvas was centred on the page.

\- Adjustable speed of the simulation. Just a "slow/medium/fast/ultra"
selector would be fine IMO.

BTW, do you know about the Hashlife optimization/memoization technique? You
probably won't need it to speed up this 64x64 simulation, but in case you
hadn't heard about it, check it out because it's a fairly amazing trick (IMHO)
and also results in ridiculous speed-ups. See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashlife](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashlife)
and (from external links) I remember this explanation to be fairly clear:
[http://www.ddj.com/dept/ai/184406478](http://www.ddj.com/dept/ai/184406478)

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Pxtl
As much as I love Conway's Life, I always find it frustrating to play games
based upon it since it depends so much on single-block offsets and the grid...
it's so discrete. I mean it's neat, but I don't generally find it makes for
fun boardgames.

I'd love to see it adapted into a physics-driven gridless environment - some
kind of fusion of Osmos and cellular automata.

~~~
genjipress
Something like SmoothLife sounds like it would be a good match for what you're
thinking about:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJe9H6qS82I](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJe9H6qS82I)

~~~
Pxtl
Sweet merciful crap that's beautiful. Holy poop!

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genjipress
I'm working on my own "shooter" based variant of Life called "Xtaloid".

[http://www.genjipress.com/xtal](http://www.genjipress.com/xtal)

It's being designed as an homage to 1980s arcade games, complete with color-
cycling effects.

Still in development, of course -- I'm hoping to have a fully-polished product
sometime early next year for various platforms.

~~~
drhayes9
This game was great! I didn't read the instructions (bad user, I know) and
didn't even know I could shoot for the first game. Once I learned that I had a
blast.

Might want to inline those keyboard instructions on the attract screen.

~~~
genjipress
Yes, I'm going to be making all that stuff easier, more approchable, etc. Glad
you liked it!

Check back in the future for a greatly-expanded site.

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ColinWright
I mostly just used an R pentomino[0] - solved it more quickly than fiddling
about with gliders or spaceships.

Shotgun approach, rather than rapier.

[0]
[http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/R-pentomino](http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/R-pentomino)

~~~
vq
My configuration: [http://imgur.com/UvWrDNN](http://imgur.com/UvWrDNN)

Won in 234 generations.

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jere
The "pink" area is indistinguishable from white on one of my monitors. I'd
darken it.

~~~
anonymfus
Probably this monitor has bright set too high.

~~~
blueblob
Default settings on my monitor made this hard to see too. It's because it is
transparent. You can redefine the function that draws the screen by entering:

    
    
        function drawArena() {
        	for (var y = 0; y < CELLS_Y; y++) {
        		for (var x = 0; x < CELLS_X; x++) {
        			if (goal.x == x && goal.y == y) {
        				context.fillStyle = "rgb(0,127,255)";
        				if (arena[y][x] && !generations_until_beaten) {
        					winLevel();
        				}
        			} else if (arena[y][x]) {
        				context.fillStyle = "rgb(0,0,0)";
        			} else {
        				context.fillStyle = "rgb(255,255,255)";
        			}
        			context.fillRect(x * TILE_WIDTH, y * TILE_HEIGHT, TILE_WIDTH, TILE_HEIGHT);
        		}
        	}
    
        // Draw playable zone (if applicable)
        	if (playable.width && playable.height) {
        		context.fillStyle = "rgba(255,127,0, 0.3)";
        		context.fillRect(
        			playable.x * TILE_WIDTH,
        			playable.y * TILE_HEIGHT,
        			playable.width * TILE_WIDTH,
        			playable.height * TILE_HEIGHT
        		);
        	}
        }
    

in the javascript console (where 0.3 is the new transparency. It won't show up
until you click the next level button.

~~~
renownedmedia
I've increased the opacity in the game.

~~~
blueblob
Awesome, thanks!

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tlarkworthy
We made a game of life game for a game jam once. It's GoL on a diffusion
process. You have to prevent the yellow (infection) spreading in the blood
stream.

[http://edinburghhacklab.com/GGJ2012/](http://edinburghhacklab.com/GGJ2012/)

~~~
tim_hutton
Oh, that's a nice idea. I'm going to go and implement that in Ready.
([https://code.google.com/p/reaction-
diffusion/](https://code.google.com/p/reaction-diffusion/))

~~~
tim_hutton
Here is the thing I made:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUbOQjEiI9A](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUbOQjEiI9A)

As a Ready file: [https://reaction-
diffusion.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/Ready/Pa...](https://reaction-
diffusion.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/Ready/Patterns/Experiments/LifeBlur.vti)

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ansimionescu
This was a lot of fun [1]. I used two lightweight spaceships to pass the last
level [2]

[1] [http://i.imgur.com/LJLzOpc.png](http://i.imgur.com/LJLzOpc.png)

[2]
[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Game_of_l...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Game_of_life_animated_LWSS.gif)

~~~
Udo
I used an explosion chain reaction, it was quite pretty:
[http://creativepark.net/img2/cwgl.png](http://creativepark.net/img2/cwgl.png)

This game should have more levels :)

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piokuc
There is an interesting Kaggle competition based on Conway's Game of Life
going on at the moment: "Reverse the arrow of time in the Game of Life"
[http://www.kaggle.com/c/conway-s-reverse-game-of-
life](http://www.kaggle.com/c/conway-s-reverse-game-of-life)

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Falling3
I really like the concept, but I found it extremely frustrating to draw and
undraw the squares.

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devinmontgomery
This was great - I'd love to see more levels. As mentioned, the r-pentamino
and other Methuselahs are over-powered. Maybe having some "friendly" cells
that disqualify you if activated would make it more balanced.

~~~
renownedmedia
The new version of the game introduces "dead zones", and future levels will
require more skill than flooding the arena with chaos.

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bjackman
Fun! I've never got to know the Game of Life before, and I couldn't find one
on the web where you could go step by step and step back, so I made this
[http://www2.cs.man.ac.uk/~jackmab1/life/](http://www2.cs.man.ac.uk/~jackmab1/life/)

Sorry, its probably unusable on phones and stuff.

ps: code's here if anyone wants to fiddle with it, only 100 lines or so
[https://bitbucket.org/bjackman/life](https://bitbucket.org/bjackman/life)

yep, this is actually how I just spent about 3 hours of my friday night...

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lcasela
If anyone want's to simulate this on there own computer you can use this:
[http://golly.sourceforge.net/](http://golly.sourceforge.net/)

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muhuk
When you reach the first challenging level (the one with three pulsars and you
can draw at the bottom) you were supposed to be educated and ready. But the
previous levels didn't do it for me. I suppose I was supposed to remember the
pattern in the previous level or something. How many hacker points did I lose
now?

Also it's not fun to draw in the tiny little grid. It would make life much
easier if the shapes on the right was draggable to the canvas.

~~~
renownedmedia
At the time, I didn't have a level built yet that showed you how to build a
proper ship. That's been fixed now though.

------
rikacomet
cool! But why call it glider? It works like a micro-organism, a name like
Amoeba would have been more suitable maybe?

the blue dot can be the "food".

Also, can the plane be made to center, instead of aligning left? I prefer the
interaction area to be centered if possible.

~~~
jere
You seem not to be familiar with Conway's Game of Life.

I think reading about it will answer several of your questions, but surely
some of it is just historical (the glider was discovered 43 years ago):
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glider_(Conway%27s_Life)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glider_\(Conway%27s_Life\))

~~~
rikacomet
thanks, no I didn't think this was that old! Completely surprised.

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punamenon2
The game if life is to stay alive the longest isn't it?

6 pieces 866 generations:
[http://i.imgur.com/pF5TXxR.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/pF5TXxR.jpg)

~~~
renownedmedia
Eventually I'll add a leaderboard and track both fastest and slowest solutions
;)

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j2kun
Perhaps more interesting: can you modify the rules of game of life in some
small way so that it can achieve objectives _on its own_?

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Houshalter
Suggestion: It would be nice if there were better drawing tools. Like making
continuous strokes rather than clicking every single cell.

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valtron
1393 generations using the shotgun approach.

~~~
renownedmedia
In the future I'll keep track of highest (and lowest) scores, as the more
generations it takes, the more fun it is to watch :)

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anonymfus
"You've won the game!"

After this nothing happens on click to "Next level" except disabling this
button.

~~~
renownedmedia
There are only four levels right now... I'm going to bump it up to 20 tonight!

------
dllthomas
Very nice. I put together a little first person platformer atop a Life grid
once - was fun to play with.

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gringothe4th
play this on loop whilst playing
[https://soundcloud.com/stelios_strong/s-strong-whitestick-
fr...](https://soundcloud.com/stelios_strong/s-strong-whitestick-free-d-l)

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mratzloff
I don't see any pink region. Tried on an iMac with Safari and Chrome.

~~~
Pxtl
First level is non-interactive demo. You can proceed to the second level by
letting it run to completion. Yeah, it confused me too.

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chrispine
Would probably be a lot of fun if the interface weren't so horrible.

Fun idea, though.

~~~
renownedmedia
You don't like Times new Roman?!

The UI is a bit better now, still not good though.

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kvgr
Need more levels!

