make me wonder if anyone has ever made an actual game out of game-of-life?
good work. the gradually fading trails are a nice touch. clever 'abuse' of the rgb channels being independent. :)
good work. the gradually fading trails are a nice touch. clever 'abuse' of the rgb channels being independent. :)
1) There is a classic space shooter game whose physical engine is defined solely in terms of a cellular automaton. However, to make this work the rules are not exactly Conway's rules, and cells have more than two states (multiple colors instead of black/white).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaIkQUuHoSw
2) Strategy Game: A long time ago I developed such a concept with a friend, but we never implementated that game. The idea was to have a strategic game whose units (and their strength/weaknesses) are fully described by Conway's rules, such that new "units" are not defined by the game designers, but by the players. And dicovering new interesting Game-of-life structure may give you an advantage over your competitor.
3) However, somebody else implemented a strategy game of top of Conway's game of life. It has a very different concept than what my friend and me envisioned, though, so I guess there is room for many more different games:
http://lifecompetes.com/ is interesting, as is http://gameoflifetotalwar.com/ (already posted by vog). The other links I saved seem to have died. None of them worked quite the way I envisaged[!] but there have been a few interesting variations on using the basic rules to make a competitive game.
[!] so writing my own is still on the list of "weekend projects that might happen if hell freezes over and I find the time"!
But yes, there is an actual game out of the game of life: http://lifecompetes.com/.
I cant remember it exactly but there was a grid and 2 teams with 2 different cell colors. Every turn the game of life rules were applied once to "advance" in time, and in every turn you can add a square of your team and remove a square from the other team