Archive for the Game of Life tag
Another Game of Life
It seems that everyone who has ever programmed in Java has, at some point, created a variation on John Conway’s Game of Life. Well I wouldn’t want to break with tradition. Here’s mine.
This is just a code dump, but the applet is so simple that it doesn’t really require a tutorial anyway. I’ll paste the code directly into the post below, but if you must download a zip file, you can click here.
Here’s the demo: With motion blur / Without motion blur
(Press spacebar to pause, toggle cells by clicking them with your mouse, then press spacebar again to animate.)
My take on it
Like I’ve mentioned before, the motion blur trick is a little tired. But the idea I had with this applet was to use the automaton to generate some interesting 8-bit-esque texture maps. Since we’re wrapping the cells around the edges of the applet, a screen capture of any frame can be tiled seamlessly. The example above was made from a 40 cell x 40 cell square, reduced to be a 40px x 40px tile, which was in turn defined as a pattern in Photoshop and used to fill the image.
Although the example above is made from a tiny tile, I think it looks pretty nice. Interesting wallpaper, if only conceptually. Certainly not meant to be used for realistic bump mapping or anything.
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