Diamonds are a Tode's best friend

Welcome back! to the weekly...

⏰🤖 TODEPOND TIMES 🤖⏰ 

What's new this week?

Trilogy Time

I claim that I release one video per month. And for the 8 months between April 2021 and January 2022, I just about managed this! But now... NOW... I'm running 4 months behind! Oh dear.

There have now been three videos... that have taken much longer than expected. Those videos are:

🧳 Tourism
🌀 Time Travel
and now... 🤖 Nothing

But for each of these videos, I feel like it's been worth it in the end.  The delay has usually been because of me trying to do something new - something I haven't done before.

After making each of these mammoth videos, I pump out some quicker+shorter ones immediately afterwards (to practise being FAST again)! I plan to do that this time too. Stay tuned! The Saga will continue eventually :)

Diamonds

To finish the last section of the next video, I've been adding more features to CellPond! You can now use the new 'diamond' shape to do 'fancy stuff'.

In CellPond, you sometimes want to make a rule for a specific colour. For example, you might want to make Red change to Pink. But sometimes, you want to make a rule for ALL colours, or LOTS of colours, at the same time. You might want to say... EVERY colour changes to pink. Or perhaps... EVERY colour gets redder.

You can now do that! With... diamonds.

Diamonds let you make rules that include "whatever colour is already there". And you can be more picky if you'd like. You could say "whatever colour is already there... as long as it has a lot of blue in it".

You can also add/subtract diamonds to/from a colour. You could make a rule that increases the red value of a colour by a little bit each frame. Or you could make it subtract the redness of a colour from its blueness(?)... and so on...

This lets you make some colourful stuff! I'll be posting up some examples on my twitter, if you'd like to see!

Stamps

The next thing I need to make is... Stamps!

Last week, I mentioned that CellPond tries to be clever (always a dangerous move). It tries to figure out which cells to move where - to help you out. But sometimes, you might want to override this. You might want to tell CellPond "move THIS cell THERE". This would let you make more complicated elements, like a growing plant!

To tell CellPond what to do, you'll be able to stamp little holes into squares. Punching a hole in a square tells the engine: "USE THIS ONE!!! (please)"! This is already implemented behind-the-scenes, so I now need to add it to the user interface :)

Shape and Size

To prepare for the next-next-video (✨ NEW Cellular Automata), I've been making 'parodies' of well-known cellular automata. Last week, I started making my own version of Slackermanz's MNCA.

I have a huge amount of respect for Slackermanz and his explorations with cellular automata. He's made some incredibly lifelike-looking things, and I was really pleased to visit it in 🚩 Tourism 2. 'VulkanAutomata' is the engine that runs his simulations, and I've done a little bit of work with Slackermanz on getting it to run on Windows.

The key thing about MNCA is that it uses Multiple Neighbourhoods. What does that mean? Let me explain...

Many cellular automata (like the Game of Life) work by getting each cell to look at its surroundings. In Game of Life, each cell looks at the square around it:

🟦🟦🟦
🟦⬜🟦
🟦🟦🟦

This is its single NEIGHBOURHOOD. But in MNCA, cells look at more than one neighbourhood! (and then combine them together in various ways)

In Slackermanz's MNCA, he looks at circle-shape neighbourhoods of different sizes.
🐸 Same shape
🐸 Different size

So for my version, I thought I would try using neighbourhoods that are all the same size... but many different shapes:
🐸 Different shape
🐸 Same size

Here are some of the neighbourhoods I'm using:

⬜⬜🟦⬜⬜
⬜🟦🟦🟦⬜
🟦🟦⬜🟦🟦
⬜🟦🟦🟦⬜
⬜⬜🟦⬜⬜

⬜⬜🟦⬜⬜
⬜⬜🟦⬜⬜
🟦🟦🟦🟦🟦
⬜⬜🟦⬜⬜
⬜⬜🟦⬜⬜

⬜🟦⬜🟦⬜
🟦🟦⬜🟦🟦
⬜⬜🟦⬜⬜
🟦🟦⬜🟦🟦
⬜🟦⬜🟦⬜

Aaaaaaaaaand, we're all out of time! Hopefully I can show you more next week :)

Welcome to my new patrons - thank you so much for joining. And thank you to all of you, who continue to support me and my little projects! It means the world to me, and I hope you enjoy everything that's coming soon! See you next week! ⏰🤖⏰

Days since tode went missing: 21