Kris information 3 glöps
- general:
- level: user
- personal:
- 64k Amiga OCS/ECS Electric Lifeforms by Ghostown
- Hi, Kris here!
Many thanks to all the warm comments and welcomes coming our way. As Spook already explained this started as an experimental project by Cahir at university. Me being the retro computer enthusiast that I am, I couldn't pass up this opportunity and attended the course ;) I've only ever coded a little bit for the C64 before (in terms of retro platforms anyway), so I had some preliminary knowledge which comes with low-level coding, but all of the machine-specific details were new to me. Suffice to say, Cahir did incredible job explaining all the Amiga intricacies to us, so the demoscene can thank him specifically for raising two new coders. I’ve stuck around after the course since it was fun coding for another platform where I have full control over the hardware and now we’re here ;)
I was mostly responsible for the game of life and wireworld (flowing electrons) effects in this prod. The idea for the former sprung up after watching Rule 30 by Andromeda way back in fall 2021. Piotr Polesiuk (another professor at the same university) came up with the idea of using a sat-solver to find a sequence of blits that would compute the next step of any 2D CA (cellular automata) by leveraging the blitter's function generator. He kindly provided us with a script for that and I coded and expanded the effect. What you can see in the intro are CA with different rules switched dynamically, sprinkled with some synchro. Wireworld takes from these ideas but has an additional (perceived) difficulty that the CA states are now 2-bit, but due to some simplifications they can be reduced to 1-bit + some tiny bit of extra logic, so it was possible to reuse almost all of the code used in game of life.
There's a little more going on behind the scenes but we're hoping to release a technical writeup on how these effects work in detail so stay tuned. In the meantime you can browse the effects' source since there are more technical explanations there. - isokadded on the 2023-04-18 21:50:43
account created on the 2023-04-10 19:50:16