Group Identity

Welcome back! To the weekly...

🤖 TODEPOND TIMES 🤖

What's new this week?

Fools

Happy April Fools Day! I usually do a little gag on April Fools Day... Last year we had AmpersandPond. THIS YEAR, I've decided to simplify CellPond by removing all the colours. It makes it quite tricky to use (but presents a fun little challenge)!... So I'll definitely change it back to normal tomorrow! In the meantime... you can use the normal version by using this link: cellpond.cool?nofools 

I notice that some people seem to really tire of April Fools gags... I think it's good to inject a bit of dumb fun into our lives :)

Groups

I've been working hard on making the next video, 🤖 Nothing! This week, I made a section about how to make Water in CellPond. This means that there's only a couple more sections to go!

To make Water, I needed to add a new feature to CellPond... You can now group different colours together! This helps when you want different colours to work in the same way. For example, let's say you want to make Red AND Blue cells fall down... Before, you'd have to make two rules (one for Red, one for Blue). Now, you can make one rule for Red OR Blue.

Identity

To get the new CellPond feature to work, I needed to make some behind-the-scenes changes to the nuts-and-bolts of the engine. Previously, it would randomly pick what colour to change cells into - if there was more than one possible outcome. So in that previous example... it would randomly pick Red and Blue when changing a cell.

We don't want that! It would cause Red and Blue cells to randomly change to Red or Blue each time they moved. We want them to KEEP their colour where possible. So I made the engine a bit smarter. It now tries its best to KEEP CELLS THE SAME where possible. There are still some bugs with it... but it's good enough for the video!

Channels

To make the NEXT section of the video, I need to add another feature! Each colour in the engine is made of three parts - red, green, and blue. These combine together to make the colour! With the new feature, you'll be able to swap around these different parts.

For example... A cell will be able to swap over its 'green' and 'red' values. And it'll be able to add/subtract them together... or add/subtract a number to/from them. I'll use this new feature to make Seed and Reed elements!

To get this to work, I'm going to make a new shape. You'll be able to access it from the toolbar at the top, and place it into a colour. Currently, it's a tall rectangle, but I think I'm going to change it into a diamond (to differentiate it even more).

LNCA

I'm trying to get ahead for the next-next-video! Which is going to be called ✨ New Cellular Automata (as voted for by patrons). For the video, I'm making 'parodies' of well-known Cellular Automata.

This week, I've been making my own version of Slackermanz's MNCA (short for Multiple Neighbourhood Cellular Automata). I call it... LNCA

Lots of
Neighbourhoods
Cellular
Automata

This edition of the TODEPOND TIMES is getting a bit long... so hopefully I can show you how it works next week :)

Thank you so much for supporting me and my little projects! Welcome to all the new patrons this month! And welcome back to all my long-term supporters. I hope to release the next video NEXT WEEK. See you then! 🤖🤖🤖

Days since tode went missing: 14