Sam Gentle.com

Automata

A screenshot of automata

I started off wanting to make a particle system using magic shader magic, but I ended up making a Game of Life simulator instead. I'm pretty impressed with all the crazy stuff you can do using shaders and vector math. On a Raspberry PI GPU I can get pretty close to 60fps at 1920x1080 cells, which is not bad considering how terribly optimised the code is.

The pictured automata is actually something a bit different from regular Game of Life. I tweaked the numbers a bit because I wanted something noisier. It kinda has this strange quality where it feels like it's moving in lots of different directions at once. I'll try to make a WebGL version of it sometime soon, because it's very mesmerising.