Excellent work as ever, merthsoft! It's interesting to see the very distinctive sequences generated by the different rule sets. Do you have further plans for this?

Oh yeah, I meant to ask that too, because I'm having trouble thinking of more things that could be added.

I'd like to have better graphics and key handling, as well as some templates for common things.

Templates like rubber stamps?

Is that a reference to something?

By templates do you mean like 'stamps' in paint programs that place prearranged things on the canvas, in this case things like 2x2 dormant dots and small gliders?

Yeah, like that.

...Did I not just ask that two posts above yours? Merth, not really, other than a reference to, you know, rubber stamps. Like the kind that you press into pads of ink.

since I think you already know about the colors issue, I'll talk primarily about another one. When you set the background to blue, the color of living cells to red, and the grid to black, you get a weird effect of the cells that seems to draw them one pixel too far to the left, like this:



As you can see, it's kinda like a 'Shadowed' effect that looks really cool, but I'm sure it isn't mean to be like that. I can assure you I didn't just see it wrong, it makes that weird effect for real.

Are you sure it's one whole pixel to the left? This seems like a subpixel issue to me...

yeah, it's a whole pixel, and I only really saw it with those colors -- the red is drawn with 1 pixel tot he left black and 3 to the right black -- maybe it's a subpixel issue, but I have no idea how something like that could happen

That's just the way the screen is. If you move your head when looking at it, you can see the red move around.

not for my screen. I just tried it again, whilst moving it around, and the same thing happens. It seems as though for some reason it just draws all red on the screen one pixel to the left of where it should be.

It's because of sub pixels.

in that case, may I suggest you draw all cells with a decently-high red value one pixel to the right? That would probably get rid of the effect.

It's because it's pure red next to pure blue. If you change the dead to white the effect is much less noticeable. The way a pixel works is it's a strip of red, a strip of green, and a strip of blue. So having red that close to blue makes it looks a little off. Drawing the pure-red pixels one pixel to the right would make it look terrible if the dead cell were, say, yellow.

Exactly this. Think of one row of the screen as trios of RGBRGBRGB pixels. Because the blue from one pixel and the red from the next pixel are right next to each other, it looks like the red has moved one pixel over, but as Shaun said, it's most noticeable for pure blue and pure red.

interesting -- that may be why. Another interesting thing, is that the blue and red aren't touching when this happens. They are seperated by black pixels from the grid. Are the blue subpixels in the black pizel still the cause?

No, think about having blue-black-red, and having red-black-blue:

RGBRGBRGB

RGBRGBRGB

Notice how blue-black-red makes the subpixels be very close together across the black pixel, but red-black-blue makes them very far apart.

Merth, would you consider implementing various topologies for the map borders? (toroidal, cylindrical, klein bottle, moebius strip)