"John Williamson" <wil### [at] dcsglaacuk> wrote in message
news:3DB59C25.6BB59F46@dcs.gla.ac.uk...
> Hi,
>
> I really like this animation. The nicely matched panning is a pretty
> cool effect. Are the individiual cells blob components or just
spheres?
Thanks, in this version they're blobs that rise/fall/grow/shrink
depending on "Age"

>
> > They take huge amounts of time,
>
> Perhaps you could run the patterns in some external code and convert
> to script afterwards...
That would be quicker, but then I'd have to write code that can do
some incredibly tricky things with optimisation.  Universes seem to be
in the range of millions of cells.  Life32 uses a universe of 1million
x 1million cells!

>
> > and yet whilst looking prettier they
> > don't show the depth of detail that the propper apps do.
>
> Hmm, but looking pretty is important! Especially since life patterns
> can often look quite dull in standard viewers.
>
> I'd really like to see some of the larger life patterns rendered
> like this; breeders, rakeguns even the massive turing machine
> Paul Rendell built (might take a while to render that, though!).
I've just looked that up!  It's 1700x1600.  A mortal human worked all
that out?
If you've got the spare processor time to try these, I've made the
include available from my website...
You might need to make a converter from the life format (which limits
the length of one description line to 78chars) unless you want to hand
code the ~3million cells!
I might make a converter from the conventional Life format to my inc's
format at some point, though.


--
Mark Hanford

Putting POV code on the web? Make it look pretty with POV2HTML...
http://www.hanfordonline.co.uk/povray

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