Conway's Game of Life in Boom

[P1gl3t]

Hi all!

I've been reading that Doom is Turing-complete, but couldn't find many wads showing off this.

 

After struggling for a while with basics of Doom mapping and using WadC, I've managed to create a limited simulation of Conway's Game of Life in a complevel9 WAD.

It doesn't use any mapping tricks - just scrollers, teleporters and floor movement, and I was a bit hesitant whether it's worth posting here, but maybe someone will find it interesting of useful.

 

Unfortunately I couldn't fit a board larger than 13x13 cells, as my code uses quite a lot of sectors and lines per each cell for performing computations and synchronizing state between cells.

It's also not very fast - increasing scrolling speed above 32 makes the Wad stop working correctly for some reason (perhaps some linedefs get skipped), also the above-mentioned synchronization incurs noticeable overhead.

The Wad can be downloaded from: https://github.com/pwiecz/conway.wad/releases/download/1.0-rc1/conway.wad and the somewhat ugly WadC source code can be found: https://github.com/pwiecz/conway.wad (right now it requires a hacked version of WadC, as described in the README).

To "play", step on the cells you want to make live, and then pull the switch to start simulation.

The WAD can also be downloaded from ID Games: https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/Ports/a-c/conway

 

Cheers!

Spoiler

 

 

Edited January 5, 2023 by P1gl3t
New version released

[P1gl3t]

I've hacked sidedef packing into WadC (https://github.com/pwiecz/wadc/commit/c6ade0a0a7f769b4ed6f55d671b92602d2cf83e7) which allowed increasing the board size from 9x9 to 12x12 (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1o6KD1t4SVO8tVWte9wV8qFCUugr9B190/view?usp=sharing), and later 13x13 (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ma_2cOn-VKlpI-XwsUeaOqtklgDv_b9p/view?usp=sharing). Unfortunately my sidedef packing breaks texture positioning, so it's not a complete solution :/

 

Best!

 

Edited October 20, 2022 by P1gl3t

[Obsidian]

Moved to WADs and Mods to get a few more eyes on it for ya. :)

[Shepardus]

Nice, I'm always down for some complex Boom scroller machinery!

[Jon]

Lovely to see people do cool things with WadC. I'm hoping we will end up merging both of @P1gl3t's changes into the main codebase. I'd love to include the Conway example in examples/, too, if he's willing.

Edited October 20, 2022 by Jon

[Billa]

This is incredible, thanks for your work!! I've always wanted to see someone make this. 

[P1gl3t]

@Jon , I could have never created this without the WadC. :)

This some spare time coming weekend, I hope to be able to clean up my changes and create a pull request.

Sure, I'd love to have my level included in WadC's examples (I think the license allows it right now). I hope to someday polish and comment the Conway's code well enough to make it be useful was someone willing to learn something from it.