devlog 7 - Added explanations! + a call for help

added five small introductions, one to explain cellular automata in general, and 4 for the specific automata you can simulate in automatown, complete with fun facts and some insight on the examples.
Hopefully the game can now be used by people enitrely unknowing of cellular automata and help them understand them and learn to love them.

now, the last thing I do before shipping it, I’m asking YOU, the good people of stardance, to help give me feedback. I want this to actually be informative, and I made this project because I thought it would be fun to make the more technical side of things so I’m not confident this more user-oriented part turned out well. Please, if you can spend like 10 minutes to look at automatown and comment here (or dm me in discord-guy729/slack-guydryzun) what you think it would be of great.

devlog 6 - Colors! Electicity! (qol!)

The town got expanded into the multiple-state territory, adding WireWorld! with this CA you can very effectively simulate electrical circuits, logic gates and all of that jazz.
Also added ui so the user can more easily:

• See the controls
• Get back to the main menu

devlog 5 - building more neighbourhoods

You can now do something that I genuenly never saw, and seems to be rarely talked about - you can manually set the CA’s neighbourhood! make ’em smaller, bigger, zig-zaggy, outer-only, whatever you want! and you add to that any rule set you want, meaning you can now make 1,099,511,627,776 different CAs. as always you can check it out at https://vapor-wav.itch.io/automatown

devlog 4 - new lives

The game of life brought all of his friends to the town - you can now simulate all life-likes! make self replicating petterns, rules where nothing can die, where everyone dies, you can go wild!

Most people know only about the game of life but trust me, life-likes are incredible, complex and beutiful, and there are hundreds of thousands of them.

also slightly improved the code for detecting clicks on empty/live cells

you can play around with the program over at https://vapor-wav.itch.io/automatown

next I will probably add either Langton’s ant or Wireworld, stay tuned for that.

devlog 3 - entering the second dimension

Conway’s Game of Life has entered automatown. You can simulate the game of life, move around, zoom in and out, proggress incrementally or continuously, and change the speed of the simulation. currently has one example as I don’t have more ideas, if you have a suggestion i’d welcome you to tell me about it.
Also added zooming in and out for the other automaton, and letting you choose if the edges are ignored or if there will be edge wrapping.
you can try it for yourself at https://vapor-wav.itch.io/automatown

devlog 2 - It’s alive!

The town is now up and running over at https://vapor-wav.itch.io/automatown
Currently, you can simulate any of the 256 elemantary cellular automata in a grid of a customizable size, where you can either set the grid manually, randomly or a mix of both. You can also look at four premade examples showcasing some cool stuff, that you can also change manually.
If you don’t know about cellular automatas and this all seems like gibberish to you, I highly encourage you to try these examples for yourself, it’s insanely simple and very cool.
Making UI scale correctly in unity builds is annoying, so even though I fixed most of it, still if you don’t play in fullscreen you can’t see the very sides of the screen, I’ll work on fixing it. For now just press the fullscreen button in the bottom right of the screen.
Also I changed the way I create the cells from a basic instanciate(block, position, rotation) to an object pool which I think halves the work done for making new cells, still takes a bit to load big grids (like 1000x1000).
That’s pretty much it for this devlog, if you have a suggestion for a new feature or found a bug please do tell, and have fun with the program!

devlog 1 - humble beginnings

Do you like cellular automatas? do you have no idea what they are? well you’ve arrived at just the right place, here in automatown you can see all kinds of different cellular automatas do their many cool things.

For real though, if you dont know, a CA (cellular automata) is basically a grid of squares each having a value (usually either 1 or 0) that look at their neighbouring cells and then update themselves according to preset rules after controlled “ticks” or “generations” (a popular example caould be conway’s game of life). CAs are very good at generating crazy patterns, being chaotic and unpredictable and even turing-complete! (meaning you can make computers inside them).

A lot of CAs have easily findable programs that simulate them or pictures showing their interactions, but it can be a lot nicer to have a single place for all of them. I’ll also try to add useful information and preset grids where I can.

My project is basically just a program that can simulate as many different CAs as I can fit in it, built in unity (because that’s what I know how to use).
Right now I have:

• code that simulates the 256 elementary cellulr automata
• an ok way to visualize it and move through it, more quality of life features to be expected, hopefuly more optimization too, as that’s not something I’m not knowledgable in AT ALL so it runs quite poorly.
• an extensive amount of time not logged because it was spent researching the topic. CAs really interest me but I never formally learned about them. I also downloaded hackatime after making some stuff, so there is like at least an hour not logged because of that.

provided below is an image I got from a single black cell on the very right of the grid and rule 169.