Show HN: Terra, a JS framework for cellular automata and biological simulations

http://rileyjshaw.com/terra/

by rileyjshaw • 12 years ago

121 31 12 years ago

rileyjshaw.com

RobotCaleb• 12 years ago

This is pretty cool. Thanks for sharing, rileyjshaw.

rileyjshaw12• 12 years ago

Glad you like it! Let me know if you think of any potential improvements

FranOntanaya• 12 years ago

Do you know DarwinBots? There's plenty to take from there. I've been wishing for years for an alife sim as flexible as DB that would run well on Linux.

pokpokpok2• 12 years ago

Love it! emergent complexity, pixels, and colors! I'm working on a similar project I want to show you if you make it to a Queens Hack Night this year :)

rileyjshaw12• 12 years ago

Cha Gheill!! If I'm back in the area I'll definitely swing by, feel free to send me a link until then

Igglyboo• 12 years ago

Absolutely love this, Game of Life/Cellular Automaton never cease to amaze me even with such simplistic rules.

binocarlos• 12 years ago

That's really cool and a whole new world to discover via code - thanks!

josealicarte• 12 years ago

This is awesome, lot of update via code :), thanks this can be use for my future references

daemonk• 12 years ago

Hey Riley, this is Damian from hackerschool. Nice work. I remember you showed a prototype of this project on one of the thursday presentations.

rileyjshaw12• 12 years ago

Damian!! Neeraj and I were just talking about our check-ins yesterday; what are you up to these days?

wismer• 12 years ago

oh yous guys! When are you three gonna come back to nyc ;)

Rhapso• 12 years ago

this is a background in this vein I did a while ago.

http://www.glidr.net/

It runs a lot slower than it could. Running it faster made it less appealing. (works on mobile)

rileyjshaw12• 12 years ago

Hahah glidr, nice

ttty3• 12 years ago

I intent to use this on my planets in my game: http://54.77.31.219/ looking for this kind of stuff for some time. glad it appeared on hn (: thanks

rileyjshaw12• 12 years ago

Very cool! Let me know when you include it and I'll add a link to the page

ttty3• 12 years ago

Ok (: I'm still figuring out the mechanics. The only thing I don't really like is the way it works. Is global... :/

kordless2• 12 years ago

It would be awesome if the 'examples' actually showed you how to get it going yourself. I don't see any sample HTML anywhere, and your main page's JavaScript is compressed.

rileyjshaw12• 12 years ago

Good point! I just added a few lines to each to make them complete; if you include terra before running each example they should work now. Is this better?

kordless2• 12 years ago

I opened a ticket if you are so inclined. The problem defined is that there isn't a clear method for getting this running in a quick webpage hackup way. It's JavaScript, so it should just 'work' when I cut and paste, as long as I'm including a min file somewhere.

There appear to be a good number of dependencies in the terra.js file, which isn't explained on the page. I see something called lowdash and seedrandom in there, both of which I have never seen before and have no clue how to install. I simply want to cut and paste the examples as they are shown and get something working. I don't want to run a bunch of build processes for installing a bunch of third party libraries on my machine when all I want is to include it on a single page in my project!

Anyway, it looks really cool. Wish I could use it.

azeirah• 12 years ago

I made a really simple l-systems lib if anyone is interested. If fits in the same general vein of natural-computing.

https://github.com/Azeirah/L-Systems

johnhenry• 12 years ago

Every so often, I sit down and begin making something like this. Then I get distracted and I forget about it for a while. This is really awesome!

possibilistic• 12 years ago

Riley, this is beautiful. The design, docs, colors, presentation--just fantastic. Awesome work! :)

Show HN: Terra, a JS framework for cellular automata and biological simulations

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