This post is mainly aimed at HKoenig:
I started a page for the SOF file format at LifeWiki (here) and just wanted to make sure that I'm understanding it correctly -- is the glider example that I provide at the bottom correct? I tried to test it at the SOF lookup tool at pentadecathlon, but the server seems to be unhappy right now.
Also, what (if anything) does SOF stand for?
SOF file format
Re: SOF file format
One potential problem is that the name in parentheses should come after the encoding:
011-021-3. (Glider) !This is a glider
I guess I should have made that clear. At first this was supposed to be just the object encoding, one object per line, but I found that there were times that it would be nice to add information. So the parser I wrote just passes along everything after the "." when extracting a name or comment. My SOF viewer program, for example, can optionally display the name field below each object, if there is a name, but ignores the comment.
That search can be pretty stupid. It doesn't always like finding characters after the "." I also should note that it assumes that spaceships are traveling north or northwest. (Those are the normalized directions I use.) For oscillators, it appears that it will do the normalization before the lookup, but I don't guarantee that for large and/or long period oscillators. I should either fix its problems or yank it.
SOF = Small Object Format
011-021-3. (Glider) !This is a glider
I guess I should have made that clear. At first this was supposed to be just the object encoding, one object per line, but I found that there were times that it would be nice to add information. So the parser I wrote just passes along everything after the "." when extracting a name or comment. My SOF viewer program, for example, can optionally display the name field below each object, if there is a name, but ignores the comment.
That search can be pretty stupid. It doesn't always like finding characters after the "." I also should note that it assumes that spaceships are traveling north or northwest. (Those are the normalized directions I use.) For oscillators, it appears that it will do the normalization before the lookup, but I don't guarantee that for large and/or long period oscillators. I should either fix its problems or yank it.
SOF = Small Object Format
Re: SOF file format
Don't exist a converter RLE --> SOF format ?
Is beautiful that please without concept 
Re: SOF file format
Not really.
As I said, I came up with the format originally as part of a project to enumerate stable objects. Every object would occupy one line in a text file. While I ended up using it for objects with large gaps or disconnected regions, its not very efficient for that purpose. There's no "continuation" character, so you can get some really long lines.
That said, my Life program does have a way to select a rectangular part of the bit-array and create the corresponding SOF encoding that can be pasted as text into another document. Writing an encoder for that should be fairly easy.
As I said, I came up with the format originally as part of a project to enumerate stable objects. Every object would occupy one line in a text file. While I ended up using it for objects with large gaps or disconnected regions, its not very efficient for that purpose. There's no "continuation" character, so you can get some really long lines.
That said, my Life program does have a way to select a rectangular part of the bit-array and create the corresponding SOF encoding that can be pasted as text into another document. Writing an encoder for that should be fairly easy.
Re: SOF file format
Will be fabulous!Writing an encoder for that should be fairly easy.
Is beautiful that please without concept