Hi,

This is my first real use of povrays animation features and so I thought I would
post it up to let people see.

The animation is based around Conways game of life but then extrapolated into a
3D setting (if you don't know about the 2D version go here
http://www.bitstorm.org/gameoflife/ you will understand better that way)
At the moment I am just having fun running my code and trying to work out some
sensible 'life and death' rules, however here is a first shot with it. I have
also included two runs of the code, one with spheres for each cell and another
with blobs, let me know which you prefer.

The video can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0pmtKtkw9Y

Malcolm

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milco2006 wrote:
> The animation is based around Conways game of life 

Cool. When you get a good set of rules, would you post them?

Also, I think it would look better if it was "less digital" in the time 
step. Make the cells fade in, or grow up. Also, it's not uncommon to 
make the cells change color based on age, so a new cell is white, and 
after (say) five generations it's grey, and after 10 generations it's 
black.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     "That's pretty. Where's that?"
          "It's the Age of Channelwood."
     "We should go there on vacation some time."

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Thanks for the feed back. I can definitely implement the colour by age idea, in
fact I have already written the code for a 2D version of the game.

With regards to trying to trying to get cells to fade in I am a little less sure
of how to implement this in a way that doesn't involve creating great reims of
code. You will notice if you look closely that in the blob version the cells
are initially small and then grow to full size if they live to their second
generation of life, however I wasn't terribly pleased with this effect so a
more subtle fading would be nice. Any suggestions how to animate this?

I will post the code some time soon so that other people can have fun playing
with it however I have one or two little tweaks to make first. Out of interest
what do you think of the current rules? The animation I posted was done with
'birth' when surrounded by 6 cells and 'death' if less than three cells or more
than 6 cells surrounded a given cell. This arrangment seemed to produce stable
growth and death in my test situations but I am sure there are othe
possibilities.

Malcolm

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milco2006 nous illumina en ce 2008/05/02 07:46 -->
> Thanks for the feed back. I can definitely implement the colour by age idea, in
> fact I have already written the code for a 2D version of the game.
> 
> With regards to trying to trying to get cells to fade in I am a little less sure
> of how to implement this in a way that doesn't involve creating great reims of
> code. You will notice if you look closely that in the blob version the cells
> are initially small and then grow to full size if they live to their second
> generation of life, however I wasn't terribly pleased with this effect so a
> more subtle fading would be nice. Any suggestions how to animate this?
> 
> I will post the code some time soon so that other people can have fun playing
> with it however I have one or two little tweaks to make first. Out of interest
> what do you think of the current rules? The animation I posted was done with
> 'birth' when surrounded by 6 cells and 'death' if less than three cells or more
> than 6 cells surrounded a given cell. This arrangment seemed to produce stable
> growth and death in my test situations but I am sure there are othe
> possibilities.
> 
> Malcolm
> 
If you implement colouring by age, then it would be simple to use the same to 
change the size of the cells, just adjust the radius by the gray value of the 
pigment. For the blob version, adjust the strenght by the same value. You may 
add some transmif or filter also dependent on the age of that cell.

-- 
Alain
-------------------------------------------------
Christian Science: Shit happening is all in your mind.

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milco2006 wrote:
> Any suggestions how to animate this?

I don't know if you mean technologically or rule-wise.

I was thinking you would have (say) one generation every 10 frames, and 
grow the cell from nothing to full size in that duration, and a dead 
cell would shrink over (say) the course of five frames. Color-wise, you 
might want to emphasize a cell that's going to be created with a 
full-sized bright white blob for just one frame, like a "blip" at the 
start, and maybe a dark "blip" at the end of the cell-death. I think 
that would give it a more "digital" appearance, if that's what you wanted.

Having the cells not be full sized at the end of their first generation 
seems more difficult.

Since I'm not sure how you're generating the frames to start with, I 
can't really give too much advice on technically accomplishing this. 
(Personally, I'd have probably done it by writing a program that outputs 
an SDL file for each frame, rather than coding it in SDL to start with, 
but I know that's not normal for around here. :-)

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     "That's pretty. Where's that?"
          "It's the Age of Channelwood."
     "We should go there on vacation some time."

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if you switch from spheres to blob nodes the result would be interesting.

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Hi everyone,

Thanks for your comments, I am very busy revising for uni exams at the moment
which is slowing down progress with povray pictures. However i have also
managed to break my program for the game of life somehow! I was planning to
post up the code with some of the suggested ideas but I need to fix it first.
Promise I will post the code and the updated video as soon as I can.

Malcolm

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It would be neat to have the camera slowly panning around the simulation 
as it runs--and much simpler to implement than cells that change as they 
age. ;-)

-- 
William Tracy
afi### [at] gmailcom -- wtr### [at] calpolyedu

One major known problem with supporting V-class is the complexity of its 
PCI bus adapter (EPIC and SAGA). Support for the V-class isn't going to 
happen until some really masochistic person who has access to a V-class 
is, uh, challenged by this.
     -- from the Linux-on-HPPA FAQ

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