tamapolis : Javi Agenjo's personal blog

Tag: conway

  • Hackpact Day 5: Conway in a cube

    Today I was a little bit short of ideas, and having the latest Alone In The Dark game didn’t helped.

    So I decided to give a better look to the conway shader I coded yesterday, so instead of using it as a PostFX I used it as a texture for the cube. It was easy, I only had to add the texture coordinates to the cube and activate the result texture from the conway code when rendering the cube.

    I can’t say the results are very good but for those who love the cellular automatas it is fun to see.

    I tryed to improved a little bit the conway shader but I ran out of ideas. I end up putting a different world in every color channel, so what you see is three boards at the same time (red, green and blue). I start the world using a texture which is in grayscale so more or less all channels start being almost the same.

    All the faces in the cube use the same texture, and when I coded the conway I forced the textures to repeat on the edges, so it gives the look and feel that every face behaves diferent, but they are all the same.

    I also tryed to render the cube several times with diferent sizes to give the feel that the pixels have volume, but it didnt worked. So at the end I just took advantage of the posibilities of the graphics card and use a texture big enough to have a huge conway world, and it looks fun when you see so many cells in action.

    Now screenshots and source code:

    hackpact_day5_screenshot1

    hackpact_day5_screenshot2

    Here you can download the source code: hackpact day 5

  • Hackpact Day 4: Textures and Conway

    Today I have been playing around with python for eight straight hours and the results are not very impressive, too much time wasted in stupid problems. Mostly because I keep thinking in C++ and some of the simple tasks I usually do when coding graphics under C++ are a pain in the ass in Python.

    For example, to create a multidimensional array in an efficient way, impossible, you need to use Numpy, which is a module specially designed for this purpose, but even though through numpy I took me lot of time to figure out how to apply an action to every cell.

    Or for example trying to refactor my RenderTexture class I created the Texture class that allows to load textures from disc, but then I wanted to make RT inherit from texture and I like to have several constructors, but in Python you can’t distinguish two constructors by the type of the parameters (mainly because there is no specified types) so I had to use a different approach (dictionaries for the trivial parameters).

    Also I had to deal with the classical OpenGL problems when creating the Texture class, they didn’t render correctly due to the pixel packing (I always forget that!), and some other issues.

    So to do something cool I created a PostFX using Conway’s Game of Life idea, which turn out not to be so fanzy and I don’t think it deserves an screenshot here. Because if you apply it to every frame it looks more like an edge detection algorithm.

    I’m just a little bit upset that I wasted so much time with things that didn’t translate to anything interesting. And everyday I become more and more worried that I’m wasting precious time in re-coding my old framework under a different language, which would be a stupidity because I could have keep using the old one under C++.

    The reason to move to python is to explore new fields in graphics, not to do the same but in an slow and rusty way.

    For the next episode I have some ideas, first I want to test Numpy in depth, second a friend told me about a python module specially designed to the mathmatics involved in graphics (vectors, matrices, etc), something I really need If I pretend to create something over Python. And for the ending I want to do some test about reloading the code without restarting the application.

    And now some screenshots and the source code:

    hackpact_day4_screenshot2

    hackpact_day4_screenshot1

    It is just a conway game of life executed in a shader, nothing impressive at all. Miguel Angel helped me with the automata rules.

    Here is the source code: hackpact day 4 and if you want to use it, when you hold LeftControl key it renders the Game of Life, and if you hold LeftShift it takes the boxes image as input, so tap LeftShift once while you hold LeftControl, also with the keypad Divide and Multiply you change a threshold I added to the automata and it makes some funny worlds.