Define and build core features

[jasonwebb]

What features should this project support? There are so many possibilities, but not all would be valuable from a visual art perspective. It'd be good to include just a few more features than are typically seen in art-oriented CA sims, but not go crazy trying to make a serious research tool.

Features to support

• [x] Neighborhoods
  • [x] Type: Moore or von Neumann
  • [x] Include/exclude center cell
  • [x] Configurable range.
• [x] States
  • [x] Discrete - integers, up to configurable n)
  • [ ] Continuous with configurable transition function.
  • [x] Cyclic - if n states are used, cell values will wrap around when they overflow the range.
  • [x] Rules
  • [x] Discrete - accept Wolfram binary, MCell, Golly/RLE.
  • [ ] Continuous - a function that accepts some parameters and returns a float value between [0,1].
  • [ ] Stochastic - similar input as continuous. A function that incorporates a probability distribution, but could return a discrete or continuous value.
• [ ] Patterns
  • [x] Basic geometric shapes like rectangles, circles, regular polygons.
  • [x] Draw / paint mode
  • [ ] From user-uploaded image
• [ ] History
  • [x] One generation before previous (i.e. t - 2) needed for second-order CA.
  • [ ] Allow n generations (to a limit)? This could help create awesome visual effects, but are there rules that could use these too?
• [ ] Rule maps, similar to style maps used in reaction-diffusion. Grayscale images that encode parameter presets so they can vary across the screen.
• [ ] Colors
• [ ] Histogram
• [x] Keyboard controls
• [x] Mouse controls

Rules to support

• [x] Life-like
  • Birth count
  • Survival count
• [x] Generations
  • Birth count
  • Survival count
  • Number of states
• [x] Larger than Life
  • Birth count
  • Survival count
  • Range
• [ ] Multiple neighborhoods
  • Number of neighborhoods
  • Birth count for each neighborhood
  • Survival count for each neighborhood
  • Range for each neighborhood
• [ ] SmoothLife

[jasonwebb]

Nixing plans to support SmoothLife and MNCA in this UI. They are both complex enough to warrant their own app(s).