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Comment by Pxtl | Hacker News Reader

As much as I love Conway's Life, I always find it frustrating to play games based upon it since it depends so much on single-block offsets and the grid... it's so discrete. I mean it's neat, but I don't generally find it makes for fun boardgames.

I'd love to see it adapted into a physics-driven gridless environment - some kind of fusion of Osmos and cellular automata.

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Something like SmoothLife sounds like it would be a good match for what you're thinking about:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJe9H6qS82I

Sweet merciful crap that's beautiful. Holy poop!

You can run a port of SmoothLife in Chrome (via PNaCl) here: http://gonativeclient.appspot.com/demo/smoothlife

Never heard of this, but that's absolutely mesmerising!

Osmos looks awesome! I totally get what you mean Pxtl, I reckon that there might be some very cool things you could do using reaction-diffusion systems in a game scenario.

Here's something I made/discovered that's a little like Tron: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTcH08UgcAE

One that's a little bit life-like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6sO8ZkgU9s

And this which is kinda strange, but very interesting (vibrating moving solitons/gliders with oscillating worms that emit glider-streams): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKHddTQA7wM

Example pattern files for the latter two of these are distributed in the Ready-0.6 release.

I have similar feelings to you about the fiddliness of games based on life. A few years back, it inspired me to build this as an experiment in unfiddly GoL play: https://github.com/lharding/The-Automataic-Gardner

(warning: Processing. Been meaning to port it to JS forever now.)

I find it difficult because so many normal concepts like momemtum, conservation of mass, etc don't seem to apply.

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