Massively multiplayer Game of Life. Keep cells of your color alive. Your color is the border of the webpage.
Controls: click, arrow keys or middle mouse+drag, scroll wheel (and a poor touch interface)
You begin with a square of your own color - you can only add black cells, but they can be used to grow your square - when a cell is born, it will be the color of the majority of its neighbours (or black if there is no majority).
The post-ld version has much better touch support, a smaller world so you might notice if someone else is playing at the same time and tracks the number of your cells alive. Rate based on the original, but use the latter if you're on a touchscreen or just want to have fun.
Very cool concept, it's a fun little twist on multiplayer paint systems. I like that I can't draw too many squares at once, it makes it feel more collaborative (or something). I know that the black areas are where people managed to actually draw black instead of clicking once or twice.
@jabdownsmash You can make a black pattern solo if the ones you create don't die immediately (colored cells can help them survive ). Black cells can also arise where 3 different colors meet.
I spent way too long playing this game. It'd be interesting to add a sort of build phase where the simulation pauses and you can build some structures before the simulation resumes. I accidentally scrolled out and that seems to ?lag? things pretty severely. Had to restart at that point.
It seems like I'm not the only person to do something based on the Game of Life. If you liked this, you should check the others out - they are great and take the idea in very different directions.
@philip45, I kind of like the constraint of only adding one cell per step. Also, as it currently is, you can only add black cells, so adding too many at once would make it harder for your color to survive (which is supposedly the goal :) ).
I'm sorry about zooming - if you scroll up and wait a minute, it usually catches up with rendering, but there are 2 things I should have changed to stop it freezing in the first place - firstly, I did put a limit on zoom level, just didn't make it strict enough (you can zoom out to 1 pixel per cell). Secondly, I redraw the whole thing on each event that could change things. This works great when changes happen less often than rendering takes (if you're not doing anything, it's once per second), but it's a problem when scrolling rapidly and rendering takes ages due to the scale. I've realized that I should have been running something about 1000 times a second that checks a boolean and redraws if it needs to. If rendering was taking too long, this would just automatically run less frequently, allowing multiple changes to happen between redraws.
There's also the possibility of speeding up rendering - right now, I just make lots of calls to the canvas API's fillrect method, but since the grid is a 256x256 torus, I could just draw that once and then copy it across the canvas. I thought about that during the jam, decided it would take too long for a minor gain. (I should have applied the same reasoning when I decided to implement base64 encoding myself, but hey).
Provided that a new square must appear at some position according to the rules of the game of life, I don't really get how the colour of this new square is determined. Is it some kind of majority?
@loig A new cell is born if exactly 3 neighbours are alive. If a majority (2) of those share a colour then the new cell has that colour, otherwise it is black. Surviving cells don't change colour.
@kaisean-games could you check that you're visiting https://imojc.nfshost.com and not http://imojc.nfshost.com ? I get that error if I visit the insecure version. It's not intended, but is probably some weird interaction between my server program (which makes mistakes with how it implements HTTP) and the hosting provider (which acts as an HTTP proxy, adding TLS and fixing most of my mistakes).
@kaisean-games It's working fine for me on https. Could you let me know what operating system and browser you're using? It might be worth trying https://imojc.nfshost.com/postld/ , but I don't know what could be wrong.
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Very cool concept, it's a fun little twist on multiplayer paint systems. I like that I can't draw too many squares at once, it makes it feel more collaborative (or something). I know that the black areas are where people managed to actually draw black instead of clicking once or twice.
And RIP. 😭
- https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/life-1/
- https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/life/
- https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/conways-garden-of-life/
- https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/game-of-life
- https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/golkia
- https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/life-42-cells
- https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/life-alive
If you know of any others, please tell me about them.
I'm sorry about zooming - if you scroll up and wait a minute, it usually catches up with rendering, but there are 2 things I should have changed to stop it freezing in the first place - firstly, I did put a limit on zoom level, just didn't make it strict enough (you can zoom out to 1 pixel per cell). Secondly, I redraw the whole thing on each event that could change things. This works great when changes happen less often than rendering takes (if you're not doing anything, it's once per second), but it's a problem when scrolling rapidly and rendering takes ages due to the scale. I've realized that I should have been running something about 1000 times a second that checks a boolean and redraws if it needs to. If rendering was taking too long, this would just automatically run less frequently, allowing multiple changes to happen between redraws.
There's also the possibility of speeding up rendering - right now, I just make lots of calls to the canvas API's fillrect method, but since the grid is a 256x256 torus, I could just draw that once and then copy it across the canvas. I thought about that during the jam, decided it would take too long for a minor gain. (I should have applied the same reasoning when I decided to implement base64 encoding myself, but hey).
Feel free to ping me when you think this is fixed.
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/game-of-life
IMOJC is a little laggy on my PC. Well, naturally I do not expect the simulation to be faster but the UI could be more responsive.