Here's some crazy brilliant inventiveness in Second Life before 2010 ends: Adeon Writer created an LSL-scripted version of Conway's Game of Life, which is impressive in itself, but then went another step further by making it a Linden Script Language program that you can, say, put on some prims and wear. And why not display the life and death of a whole virtual species on your back? Watch:
Adeon open sourced the code, which you can get right here. "You'll need to drop that script into an object made of the correct amount of cubes (the script will tell you if you do it wrong)," he tells me. "It should handle everything else and build itself. For those not build savvy, I can send a copy to anyone who wants one, feel free to distribute or improve it." In other words, the Game of Life is an open source project in Second Life.
Adeon was inspired to make this version of Conway's simulation after seeing a previous one by Jim Purbrick (when he was still at Linden Lab), one using LSL, the other running in Mono:
"[Jim] pitted two Conway simulations against each other to show Mono's speed improvement," Adeon explains. "But that [demo] was from 2008, and I wanted to try my own hand at writing a cellular automata to see if I could make one that was faster than the 2008 demo, wether it be due to an improved LSL toolset and better SL servers, or just a faster algorithm on my part. (I'm pretty sure it's mostly the former.)
"The script isn't complicated, but it's very intensive. I carried the simulation to a few regions, and I see the Conway simulation slow to a crawl on everything but the most well-running regions." And, he acknowledges, "This is absolutely NOT the best possible implementation of Conway possible in SL, there can be many improvements and innovations to speed up the simulation (and lower the prim count) that could have been done that I simply haven't thought of. This is a very rough attempt." However, he foresees even cooler implementation of Life in Second Life:
"There's a ton of room to make a better one, in both code and building. With things like Collada mesh and llCastRay around the bend, I can imagine someone could think of many crazy ways to make an even faster implementation of Conway's game." Not to mention, an even slicker conversation piece to take to your next SL party.
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