Define and build core features

[jasonwebb]

What features should this project support? There are so many possibilities, but not all would be valuable from a visual art perspective. It'd be good to include just a few more features than are typically seen in art-oriented CA sims, but not go crazy trying to make a serious research tool.

Features to support

• Neighborhoods
  • Type: Moore or von Neumann
  • Include/exclude center cell
  • Configurable range.
• States
  • Discrete - integers, up to configurable n)
  • Continuous with configurable transition function.
  • Cyclic - if n states are used, cell values will wrap around when they overflow the range.
• Rules
  • Discrete - accept Wolfram binary, MCell, Golly/RLE.
  • Continuous - a function that accepts some parameters and returns a float value between [0,1].
  • Stochastic - similar input as continuous. A function that incorporates a probability distribution, but could return a discrete or continuous value.
• Patterns
  • Basic geometric shapes like rectangles, circles, regular polygons.
  • Draw / paint mode
  • From user-uploaded image
• History
  • One generation before previous (i.e. t - 2) needed for second-order CA.
  • Allow n generations (to a limit)? This could help create awesome visual effects, but are there rules that could use these too?
• Rule maps, similar to style maps used in reaction-diffusion. Grayscale images that encode parameter presets so they can vary across the screen.
• Colors
• Histogram
• Keyboard controls
• Mouse controls

Rules to support

• Life-like
  • Birth count
  • Survival count
• Generations
  • Birth count
  • Survival count
  • Number of states
• Larger than Life
  • Birth count
  • Survival count
  • Range
• Multiple neighborhoods
  • Number of neighborhoods
  • Birth count for each neighborhood
  • Survival count for each neighborhood
  • Range for each neighborhood
• SmoothLife

[jasonwebb]

Nixing plans to support SmoothLife and MNCA in this UI. They are both complex enough to warrant their own app(s).