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Such is Life...

Name:	Frank Carney
Date Posted:	Feb 09, 2007
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I am making progress on my Conway Life program:

This has turned out to be a really fun and a good project to learn Torque internals. I am using GUI and SIM objects and will soon use particle emitters and shape objects to render the sim in 3D. The sim will stay 2D, but the visualization is going to be cool. I am also dreaming up ways to modify the rules for the game to allow cells to be more persistant.

You will notice a number on the right bottom of the screen. This is the current number of Cells currently in the grid. If that number gets above 150 the engine really bogs down. I am spawing Sim objects for each of those objects. I am also spawing up to 8 sim objects for each of the objects counted in that number on the screen. Obviously I have some redesign to do to fix the speed and resource usage issues. Right now I am not sorting the objects in the lists. I should not be using simobjects that have to be registered before use and for this application are memory heavy. Once I fix those problems I should be able to spawn thousands of these little critters. Of course then the limitation will be the visualization side.

I am thinking of turning this into a simple game that is based upon getting these cells to do some virtual work. Another idea was to create a sim for the life algorithms that students could use to research patterns. The possibilities are endless. The most important thing is I am programming and having fun!

Have fun!

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Tom Bampton (Feb 09, 2007 at 08:54 GMT)

Nice. You don't want to be using SimObjects at all, really ;) The Life algorithm is a good example of something that can be done in script, but sucks badly when it is. Reimplementing in C++ will open up a bunch of tricks you can do to make it really, really fast.

Obviously, when you come to 3D you're going to not be able to avoid having a SimObject for the visualization of a cell (well, unless you use particle emitters, dont really need one then). However, things like caching the objects and moving them around/adding or removing from the scenegraph as needed should help there.

It will be interesting to see what becomes of this. There's a lot of potentially interesting uses for the life algorithm.

T.

Frank Carney (Feb 09, 2007 at 17:50 GMT)

Right now all my objects are simobjects for convenience and are generated, destroyed, and analyzed through C++. It is very useful to be able to represent the cells as simobjects for storing to file, debugging, etc.

The areas that are slow is that I do not sort at all the lists of simobjects (linear search, slow slow slow), I create a hidden list of simobjects that determines the fate of the next generation (up to 8 times the number of cells on the grid), and then I create a new list of simobjects for output to the grid again. This is all done in C++. Like you said I should change my representation of the objects to something more light weight (at least internally for the next generation code, there are huge advantanges to keeping the simobject as my base class). I think sorting the objects will be the biggest speedup, so I will do that first.

Yes, I am very interested in what I can do. The best part will be the ability to add a sort of ambience or theme to a game. I am not just thinking magic effects, but imagine rippling the screen to make it crawl or other such special effects. I really like the idea of using to define the very essence of a world, hence the idea of making some structures more persistent. Most game systems are a numbers game and magic may or may not be intergrated. I am thinking this could be integrated into everything from a sword to a fireball. It would certainly give the whole game a mystical feel from the visuals.

Tom Bampton (Feb 09, 2007 at 18:58 GMT)

Hmmm... another novel use would be to hook it into the terraformer so it could be used for terrain generation. That would be really easy to do, in fact.

T.

Frank Carney (Feb 09, 2007 at 21:36 GMT)

Just have it step an iteration or two each time you visit a level, or at really slow rates while you are in a level. It could look really cool, and change each time you visit an area. Neat!

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