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Comment on Show HN: Multi-player Competitive Conway's Game of Life

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I made this as an experiment. It's an idea that I've been toying with for a long time, but I only just got around to building it.

Ton of questions, I've been working on a small game (+engine) myself and it has been magnitudes more difficult than I imagined.

Do you have any blog posts about the process of making this? I see the technology link, but I'd like to hear a little more about the architecture. Something along the lines of a post mortem maybe.

* What sparked this idea?

* Was your initial set of features more simple or more complex?

* Any features you had to give up on?

* Any unexpected features you were able to add after you were forced to rearchitect it? (Ok, I may be painting my own experiences on you with this question.)

* How long did it take?

Let's see...

I haven't written a post mortem yet, partly because I'm still building it, and partly because I hadn't seen it under heavy load (although I woke to emails from linode screaming at me about high CPU usage)

* The idea is one that I've been toying with for years. I've made other experiments that got some notice here a few years ago, too.

* There are some extra features that I still want to add at some point ('formations' for pre-building shapes, as an example. The database table is there, but no functionality.)

* Nothing given up on entirely yet.

* The only rearchitecting that happened was replacing the board UI with a canvas implementation. The initial version used a table and was painfully slow. From past experience I knew that wouldn't cut it, but it was an easy starting point.

* the initial commit was... October 2nd, but I didn't start working on it till a week later. All in all, I've just grabbed time between other (paying) projects.

Pretty cool! I did something similar when I was learning javascript. I built GoL for a three-state system. Here's the bl.ocks.org link : http://goo.gl/H0Wqxo

That was fun. I just discovered that I know nothing about good patterns for survival in Game of Life.

How good are those?! Led me on to some of the other breeders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_(cellular_automaton)

Not sure how good they are in practice. I just experimented a little bit with it ( https://i.imgur.com/pLyKKpg.png ) and there seem to be a pattern that destroys the uniform line pattern in certain directions (in the lower part), however, with most obstacles it left a lot of stuff behind (the upper part in the picture). The initial pattern is not very simple though: https://i.imgur.com/PfVjVOt.png

Can you give a little background on the technologies you used?

There is a 'Technology' link in the footer.

Really nice implementation btw.

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