Conway
Conway's Game of Life, for Resolume
What it does
Two FFGL plugins for Resolume Arena and Avenue in one download. SW Conway is a source that plays Conway's Game of Life (and twelve of its relatives) from a random soup or a famous pattern, and SW Conway Over is an effect whose clip seeds the field and keeps feeding it, so Life spills out of the picture's highlights.
The whole thing is a grid of cells, each alive or dead, all updated at once by one rule that only looks at the eight neighbours. Conway's rule is B3/S23: a dead cell with three live neighbours is born, a live one with two or three survives, and everything else dies. The field is an integer texture and a generation is one pass, so it's exact on every graphics card.
All of this comes from the rule on its own. Gliders crawl one cell diagonally every four generations and spaceships go twice as fast. Blinkers and beacons flip at period 2, pulsars at 3, the pentadecathlon at 15, Gosper's gun fires a glider every 30 generations, the R-pentomino boils for 1103 generations from five cells, and a random soup burns down to still shapes, blinkers and the odd wandering glider.
Cells are coloured by age, so you can tell still shapes from the boiling front at a glance, and the recently dead leave a trail for a few generations. The plugin counts every generation's live cells exactly and reseeds once the count has settled into repeating itself. Audio onsets can step the field on the beat and drop in patches of new cells.
- A source (a soup, the R-pentomino, the acorn, Diehard, Gosper's gun or a glider fleet) and an Over effect (the clip is the seed) in one download
- Thirteen rules: Conway's B3/S23, HighLife, Day & Night, Seeds, Life without Death, Maze, Replicator, Diamoeba, 2x2, Morley, Anneal, and the Generations rules Brian's Brain and Star Wars
- Integer state and one pass per generation: identical on every GPU, from 16 rows to two million cells
- Auto Reseed from an exact per-generation population count
- Cells coloured by age, with trails, five palettes and a gap; box-filtered so any cell size draws evenly
- Feed: the Over keeps breeding cells wherever the clip is bright
- Audio onsets step the field and drop patches of soup
- Universal macOS bundles and Windows x64 DLLs
Where it stands
v0.1.0, and early days. It hasn't been loaded into Resolume on macOS yet. On Windows it has: both plugins load, register and render in Resolume Arena 7.27.1 on software rendering (no GPU, no sound device) with every parameter as declared. The field changes every generation, which keeps the check's noise floor high, so all of the source's controls and seven of the effect's were confirmed live there, the rest were inconclusive, and none were dead. An offline harness driving the real plugin code asks it for the published facts of Life: the R-pentomino has 116 cells at generation 1103, Diehard is gone at 130, Gosper's gun adds a glider every 30 generations, the oscillators come back at their periods and not before, and the glider and the lightweight spaceship move at c/4 and c/2. All thirteen rules match an independent stepper cell for cell, and Day & Night and Anneal are symmetric under swapping live and dead, as published. It catches fourteen models that are wrong on purpose and one-character sabotage of its own shaders, and all 41 parameters change the picture. Auto Reseed is a rule of thumb (a population that repeats exactly for 120 generations), and the colours are chosen by eye. The macOS build is signed and notarised. There's a user guide and a browser demo, but no presets and no OpenFX port. Try it in your own rig before you trust it in a show.
Watch it running
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