Langton
Langton's ant, for Resolume
What it does
Two FFGL plugins for Resolume Arena and Avenue in one download. SW Langton is a source in which one ant (or up to eight) walks an empty grid or a soup, and SW Langton Over is an effect in which the ants walk your clip: its brightness, cut into as many levels as the rule has colours, is the ground they read and repaint.
Christopher Langton's ant (1986) sits on a grid of black and white cells. On a white cell it turns right, on a black one left; it flips the colour of the cell and steps forward. That's all. The plugin runs that rule exactly, one step at a time, and everything you see falls out of it: about ten thousand steps of what looks like noise, then, at step 9977 from an empty grid, the same 104 steps over and over, each cycle carrying the ant two cells diagonally, for ever.
Give the colours more letters and you get Greg Turk's and Jim Propp's ants. LLRR and RLLR grow symmetrically, LRRRRRLLR fills a square, and the others build convoluted highways or stay chaotic. And because every step can be undone (step back, colour back, turn back), Reverse runs the walk backwards exactly: ten thousand steps of chaos un-happen into the empty grid they came from.
The walk runs on the CPU and the picture on the GPU. Cells keep a trail that glows for a while after an ant has stood on them, five palettes colour them, and audio onsets can run the ants in bursts on the beat or turn time round.
- A source (an empty grid or a soup) and an Over effect (the clip is the ground) in one download
- Seven rules: Langton's RL and Turk and Propp's LLRR, RLLR, LRRRRRLLR, LLRRRLRLRLLR, RRLLLRLLLRRR and RLR
- Up to eight ants taking turns, from a pause to a million steps a second, or one round at a time by hand
- Reverse: the walk runs backwards exactly, back to the seed it came from
- Trails, five palettes, Cell Size and Gap; box-filtered so any cell size draws evenly
- Audio onsets run the ants in bursts on the beat, or turn time round
- 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; the fleet's own test host loads both plugins and renders through them there. 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 control as declared and the fleet's Arena checks passed twice, the second time on the shipped download; both times all 12 of the source's controls it could measure changed the picture, 15 of the effect's did and Reverse was too close to call, and the audio controls couldn't be tested there. An offline harness driving the real plugin code asks it for the published behaviour of the ant: on an empty grid the plugin's walk settles into its highway at step 9977 and repeats a 104-step cycle that moves it two cells diagonally every time, LLRR and RLLR are mirror-symmetric at every one of their returns home, and LRRRRRLLR fills a square. The walk matches an independent one cell for cell for every rule, the GPU's state texture is that walk after every frame, and every rule runs out and back to its seed exactly. It catches fourteen models that are wrong on purpose and one-character sabotage of its own shaders and code, and all 35 parameters change the picture. The grid is a torus, so the highway eventually runs into its own debris; Reverse doesn't undo a change of rule, ants or seed; and the colours are chosen by eye. 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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