TODEPOND TIMES: Just cells

Would you look at that. It's time for another weekly edition of the...

🐸 TODEPOND TIMES 🐸

What's new this week?

Just cells

Recap: A nogan is what happens when a fractal, a time machine, and a cellular automata have a baby, and that baby has a baby, and that baby has a baby, and that baby is its own great-great-great grandparent.

... and I'm making a nogan called Arroost!

But this week, I had to change some of the ways that nogans work.

More recap: A nogan is a tree-like structure. It's a collection of branches that connect things together. And those things are called nods. Or at least... they were.

Now, I just call them... cells. They're just cells. Nogan is a cell-ullar automata after all! This change wasn't needed, but I thought it would simplify things.

Just numbers

Cells (prev: nods) can have children cells (prev: children nods).

In other words, cells can be inside cells, which can be inside cells, and so on. And each cell was in charge of counting its own children. It numbered them from one to infinity. So, for example... a cell could have three children: Cell 1, cell 2, and cell 3.

And each of those children could have children as well. For example, cell 2 could have two children: Cell 1, and cell 2.

This means that every cell could be considered a nogan itself. Every cell is like another simulation, that can be taken away from its parents, and simulated on its own. It's like this because I thought I would need this functionality. It's how ScreenPond works.

But it comes with a cost! Now we have some cells with the same number. When we say "cell 2", which cell are we actually talking about?? The "cell 2" at the top? Or the "cell 2", child of the other "cell 2"? It's confusing, and ScreenPond has to deal with this in quite a tedious way.

So now... every cell has its own unique number. And the engine itself is in charge of counting them out. The cells are more light-weight, and they can't do anything by themselves. But it's a lot simpler! And it's allowing me to hook up nogan to the user interface.

Just wires

There's another change!

Recap: Recap: A nogan is a tree-like structure. It's a collection of branches that connect things together. Those branches are called wires.

Previously, wires were also children of cells, just like cells. They were stuck within their layer of the family tree. This means that they could only connect other sibling cells to other sibling cells. They couldn't connect to cousin cells, or to cells in a different generation.

But now, wires exist outside the family tree. They can point from any cell to any other cell. They can point across different layers of the nogan fractal. I honestly don't know what this means, but I hope to explore it more in future projects! It would be great to re-build ScreenPond in Arroost one day. Maybe we can experiment with it then...

And there's another thing. Wires used to be counted alongside cells. If you wanted to list out all the cells of your simulation, you'd have to skip over a lot of wires too. Child 1 could be a cell. Child 2 could be a wire. Child 3 could be a cell. This wastes a lot of time and effort!

Now, wires are counted with negative numbers instead! The first wire is -1. The second is -2. The third wire is -3. And so on.

This means that we can still keep all wires and cells in one long list, keeping it simple. But if you just want to look at one type of them, you can count in the appropriate direction. Upwards for cells. Downwards for wires.

Just Exquisitarium

On the TodePond discord server, there have been a couple of nice suggestions for collaborative and creative projects. Out of that, some work has started on something called Exquisitarium.

It's intended to become a collaborative 'exquisite corpse' game. Exquisite corpse is a type of collaborative drawing or artwork, popular within some surrealist art movements (which have been a huge inspiration to me).

It usually works like this: You take turns drawing different parts of a 'body'. But you can't see what the other players have drawn. That's part of the fun. You often end up with something that looks rather strange.

The project is just a skeleton at this point, and there's mainly nothing there. But gradually, hopefully we can build it out together!

That's all this week! I hope you enjoy these little updates. I want to say, as usual, thank you so much for supporting me and my odd projects. I can't thank you enough. Well, wherever you are in the world right now, I hope you have a great week!

Days since tode fell asleep: 203
Days since bot went missing: 168