Cells in Cells in Cells

Welcome back to the... 🐸🎺

🎺 TODEPOND TIMES!!! 🎺

Let's look at what's new this week!

Time Travel

I finally released the video about time travel! (which was picked out by patrons).
Have you seen it yet? What do you think? I hope you liked it!
If you haven't seen it yet, watch it here!

By the way, the code for the engine is all up at github.com/l2wilson94/TimePond 

There were some things that I wanted to include but didn't get time to make:

1. Field. An area of space that slows down time.

2. Real inversion, like the time travel that happens in the film 'Tenet'. I think I got quite close. If you watch some of the footage of the final time machine in reverse, it looks similar to Tenet. I used a cop-out though. When an inverted object touches a normal object, the inverted object loses its inversion. It would be fun to try to make this work!

3. Non-deterministic worlds. The engine and frogs are deterministic. You can predict exactly what they will do. However, I think that a lot of the time machines would still work if you made the frogs jump randomly. I would love to try this out in the future!

4. Recursive time travel. In the engine, you can't travel backwards in time indefinitely, because I thought that would be too complicated for my first prototype. It would be great to get this working in the future.

Hopefully, I will be able to rewrite the engine, using what I now know! TimePond 2.0! Eventually!

Cells

I've started work on my next video! My plan was to base it around reconsidering the entire design of the SandPond engine from scratch. If I were to start again from nothing... what would we change?

One key goal is... every element should be editable from the UI in the browser (as well as in the code). For simple elements (like sand), this should be quite easy to do. You could drag and drop coloured pixels to specify the sand's behaviour.

Some elements seem more difficult to do with the UI though. Anything that requires an atom to hold extra data (like a timer, or direction) gets a lot harder. Previously, I've always had to implement this sort of thing with javascript.

So what if... each atom could be made up of smaller atoms.
Let's allow cells to be broken down into smaller chunks.

I think this could allow atoms to store data in a visual and spatial way. This means that you could code it with a visual UI.

To test this out, I've started to play around with a little prototype engine where you can split cells up into smaller cells. In fact, the engine starts with just a 1x1 world. To make it bigger, you need to code an element that splits it up into smaller pieces. I'll keep experimenting with this!

Thank you for reading this week's TODEPOND TIMES!
And thank you so much for supporting me and my projects! 🐸✨