Making a RTS based on Game of Life

For general discussion about Conway's Game of Life.
7yl4r
Posts: 8
Joined: August 30th, 2013, 1:14 am

Re: Making a RTS based on Game of Life

Post by 7yl4r » December 2nd, 2013, 9:58 am

Extrementhusiast wrote:I'll just leave this here.
That is a pretty fun puzzle game, actually. I'm starting to get excited about this.

As much as I love python, and painful as I have found Android development, a mobile application is really the way to go with this if we actually want people to play it. Though I suppose we could do html5 (like this)... Let's do some digging around and see if there is some open source implementation of GoL we might be able to extend...

eaglgenes101
Posts: 14
Joined: June 3rd, 2011, 3:16 pm

Re: Making a RTS based on Game of Life

Post by eaglgenes101 » June 7th, 2014, 5:17 pm

*Pokes*
I was thinking of something similar, but with a different game system.

Any meaningful progress made on this idea yet?
  • When will a 2x2 gun be discovered...?
    Guess what Chuck Norris did when he heard about Conway's game of life? He built a replicator.
    Does LongLife have spaceships?

7yl4r
Posts: 8
Joined: August 30th, 2013, 1:14 am

Re: Making a RTS based on Game of Life

Post by 7yl4r » June 7th, 2014, 9:03 pm

eaglgenes101 wrote:*Pokes*
I was thinking of something similar, but with a different game system.

Any meaningful progress made on this idea yet?
Not much at all really. I'm still brewing on my genetic-cells project (https://github.com/7yl4r/LifeGenes), built a websocket-based proof of concept related to this (https://github.com/7yl4r/mmogolpy), and found this awesome web implementation (https://github.com/7yl4r/colorful-life), but that is all I've got.

Please share your idea though, I'm totally up for putting some work in on it.

Chesstiger2612
Posts: 15
Joined: August 14th, 2013, 1:28 pm

Re: Making a RTS based on Game of Life

Post by Chesstiger2612 » August 17th, 2014, 10:00 am

My main problem with my first ideas were (I wasn't finding solutions for all of them which was the reason I stopped working on it for a long time):
- The instability of the whole thing. I misplaced cell can ruin everything, and it normally makes no difference if you misspace/mistime by 1 square/generation or by 50, which isn't a good sign. Some forms of macros, together with modified rules could solve some parts of it but the main problem isn't that easy to solve. Playing on multiple layers where one is the macro-world which looks like a standard game and cells as microworld in specific situations (combat etc.) would be too much effort/ too counter-intuitive to play imho. Same goes for implementing more dimensions which can produce stability, but it would be impossible to not overlook something then...
- The time flow (generation by generation): Because of the instability, sometimes you need to build large constructs in one generation, which would be hard to do without some kind of pausing function. Pausing has disadvantages, too. Not as easy to handle all in all

wildmyron
Posts: 1544
Joined: August 9th, 2013, 12:45 am
Location: Western Australia

Re: Making a RTS based on Game of Life

Post by wildmyron » August 17th, 2014, 11:54 pm

An implementation of a similar idea to this has been developed by Drew Blaisdell.
Conway's Multiplayer Game of Life (Conway) is a real-time, persistent, multiplayer version of Conway's Game of Life.
An instance of the multiplayer game is available at http://lifecompetes.com and source code is at https://github.com/drewblaisdell/conway I found it fun for a short while, but I found it less enjoyable than I expected, perhaps because there is a lack of feedback which visualizes the interaction with other players.

The high-score by CyberShadow, only recently relegated to second place, is the result of a bot, source available at https://gist.github.com/CyberShadow/ab4 ... d070864957

Perhaps this will give you some further inspiration for your own games.
The 5S project (Smallest Spaceships Supporting Specific Speeds) is now maintained by AforAmpere. The latest collection is hosted on GitHub and contains well over 1,000,000 spaceships.

Semi-active here - recovering from a severe case of LWTDS.

c0b0p0
Posts: 645
Joined: February 26th, 2014, 4:48 pm

Re: Making a RTS based on Game of Life

Post by c0b0p0 » August 18th, 2014, 10:59 pm

@wildmyron: I like the idea of an infinite grid and unlimited building space, both of which make the game much simpler and are in the model you showed. First, unlimited building space makes it possible to build complex defense mechanisms without "fighting cells" and makes the game more strategic, and an infinite grid makes the game much less chaotic (i.e. a stray glider can easily delete engineered patterns in a finite grid). As an earlier post said, though, this is not the first attempt to make a game based on CGoL. Both Immigration and QuadLife (lifecolor in Golly) are earlier attempts to makes a game based on CGoL, though people got bored with playing both of them.

@Chesstiger2612: Perhaps the different cell types can have all the rules in Alan Hensel's notation save explosive rules, so as to help research on cellular automata.

jhard9000
Posts: 2
Joined: December 31st, 2015, 10:56 am

Re: Making a RTS based on Game of Life

Post by jhard9000 » December 31st, 2015, 11:28 am

I made turn based strategy game based on Conway's GOL for android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... wars&hl=en

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