User talk:Dvgrn

Just discovered conwaylife.com thanks to a link sent by Alan Hensel.

Have just been trying to sort out a possible new feature for Golly 2.1, as it happens (see the golly-test discussion thread). Koenig's Object Database is one possible place to look up small patterns, and it looks as if conwaylife.com might be another.

There's also the (probably separate) question of where to put larger engineered patterns, and collections of patterns, that people might want to download and look at. Might be possible to build this functionality into Golly to some extent, also, along with the reverse lookup function.

The main trick here is to somehow avoid the inevitable dead-link problem, as people's individual web sites move or go offline. Presumably Golly either has to point to a permanent central location where *all* the available collections are stored -- or at least there should be an index page in a central location, which can be updated as things change. That way it won't be necessary to keep downloading the latest version of Golly to avoid dead links.

Welcome! If you'd like to be able to access the database used by our site, you're of course more than welcome to. RLE files are generated by plugging in a pattern name to a URL like the following: http://www.conwaylife.com/pattern.asp?p=glider.rle, where of course you replace "glider" with the name of the pattern you want (in lowercase, no spaces or special characters). You can similarly get Life 1.05 or Life 1.06 files if you so desire by going to something like http://www.conwaylife.com/pattern.asp?p=glider_105.lif. In order to make patterns actually searchable from within Golly (or have the patterns auto-propagate in a menu within Golly or something like that), I could write a simple script that outputs a plaintext list of all the names of patterns in the "official" database, or a plaintext list of all the patterns, along with their RLE header comments if that would work well for you guys.

I also already have a script coded that allows people to save their patterns to the public ConwayLife.com database. It takes in an RLE string, a pattern name and optional comments and saves it online, so if you can send a POST request to my server from Golly, then you could have a "save online" option (though the current set-up makes the public database easy to overwrite - someone could come along and save another pattern under the same name as yours, thus overwriting it).

I'm currently the only person with access to modify the "official" database, but I'm sure I could code a form that allows some of the more interested Life gurus to "log in" so that they have access to modify the official database if there's an interest in that. Nathaniel 19:38, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

Am going to try to take notes here when I notice omissions:

• just looked up "lightspeed bubble", nothing there yet...
• and what about the inverted "spaceships" that can travel perpendicular to zebra stripes at 2c/3?

Dvgrn (talk) 04:46, 24 February 2015 (UTC)