There's quite a few things I'd like to see in a future version of Golly:
Higher-Range Outer-Totalistic rules: An obvious extension of the outer-totalistic rulespace to larger neighbourhoods. Currently supported by lifelib and lifeviewer. Would support all the neighbourhoods and ranges LtL does.
Code: Select all
x = 1, y = 1, rule = R2,C2,S1,3,5,7,9,11,13,15,17,19,21,23,B1,3,5,7,9,11,13,15,17,19,21,23
o!
Isotropic non-totalistic hexagonal notation: Currently Golly does support these rules, but only in the form of MAP strings. This notation (supported by lifelib) would make them a lot easier to understand and adjust.
http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/Hexagonal_neighbourhood
Default colour scheme consistency: Currentky, Golly colours Larger than Life rules yellow, which then fade to red when more than two states are present. However, cells are still yellow even when there are only two cell states being used. It would be better if they were white in such a case, to match the range-1 2-state rules. Range-1 Generations also uses a different colour scheme from LtL Generations; it'd look a lot better if the range-1 generations was changed to use the LtL Generations theme by default, except in the case where only two states are specified, in which case the alive cells would be white.
lifelib-supported rulespaces: Currently, lifelib supports deficient rules and Extended Generations natively. It'd be useful to have these be integrated into Golly be default to ease their exploration further, or to at least include a script for their generation.
Range-2 von Neumann isotropic non-totalistic rulespace: I find this rulespace to be quite exciting and to hold quite a lot of potential. At the time of writing, no definitive notation for these rules has been devised; three have been proposed, however. There are 618 different transitions, compared to the millions required for raneg-2 Moore, so this should be easier to implement than that.
Chiral rules: A generalisation of the isotropic non-totalistic rulespace where patterns function the same upon rotation, but not necessarily for reflection. See
here for the notation.
More rule names: There's quite a lot of them. (If added, it might be useful to make the selection box containing said rule names to only display the ones which run in the selected algorithm.)
Remove toruses: Some of the supplied LtL patterns are still run on a toroidal bounded grid. It might be useful to remove said bounding from the pattern files by default, since it can be problematic in some cases (e.g. bugs crashing into each other in bug collection).
Cylinder and Möbius strip bounded grids: Acts like an edge of a plane on two opposite sides, and connected on the two other sides (with a twist on the latter).