Sorry, I haven’t updated in ages. Prepare yourself for some rambling. I switched to Night Shift, then back to Day Shift. Went on a couple road trips, read a book or two, etc. Anyway, I’ve been porting Mode8 to SDL. It was sad when I decided to do so, as I had to throw away the coolest, and most time consuming classes. But actually the switch improved the over all structure. I’ve also been watching a lot of races over at the Velodrome. Good stuff. The Tour de France is currently in the Pyrenees’s; Team Columbia has been doing well. I wish both them and Garmin-Chipotle the best. Also, the teams that composed the ProTour decided not to renew their licenses, effectively ending, well, the ProTour. FF4ds comes out next week, and it looks fantastic. DQ4ds comes out in two months and looks even better. This years E3 was utterly pathetic; the only decent news to emerge was about Mirrors Edge, and the FFXIII port to the Xbox 360.
I was up until 3:30am last night working on this. :=)
You might remember blife. It was an implementation of Conway’s Game of Life in C, and used OpenGL to render the state of the colony. It worked in Windows, Linux, and everything else.
I threw it away.
I’ve been working on a nice and clean generic cellular automata application. I’ve been programming in C++, and using SDL to render output. The kicker is this, though–the ruleset isn’t going to be hardcoded. The idea here is to abstract away the rules, so that it can be used to simulate anything. I’m working on a LISP interpreter that will run the rulesets.
What are the advantages of this approach? In the original blife, you were bound to Game of Life, and only Game of Life. By virtue of implementing the GoL as a standard, you were also stuck with its default rules. Neither of these assumptions will be present in this new application. You’ll be able to modify life to your hearts content. And who says you have to run Life; run Wolframs ‘Rule 30′ instead. Or use it as a tsst bed for any ideas you have kicking around in your head.
I forgot to mention, SDL wont be the only output option available. NULL, Text, and PNG output will be available out of the box.
Stock and I got blife running on Mac OS X yesterday. We figured that in theory it should compile out-of-the-box since I had OS X’s OpenGL and GLUT headers in their own #ifdef clause. However, we found that linking to libraries works a bit different on OS X as opposed to the other Unix’s. On Linux, FreeBSD, etc., executables are linked to libraries by passing “-l<libraryname>” to the linker. So in this case, GLUT is linked to blife by passing “-lglut” to he linker. However, on OS X, you need to use “-framework <libraryname>”, so”-framework OpenGL -framework GLUT” gets used.
When blife 0.2.5 is released, there will be a OS X specific section in the Makefile, so OS X users can simply “make osx” and have the proper binary built.
With that said, blife has been compiled and works properly in GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, and OS X. 
blife is the cellular automaton program that I’ve been working on for the past few months. I wrote most of it in mid-November and have been touching up bits of it ever since. It’s currently written in C and runs Conway’s Game of Life rule set (23/3). I’m going to be rewriting it over the next month in C++ and implementing a generic engine so that is can run other rule sets specified at run time. If you’d like to help out, or keep up to date on the new version, please email me at brad@stackpointer.org, and I’ll keep you in the loop.
