From Discrete to Continuous Automata... but in Godot
This is a naive approach to creating Lenia in Godot, using GDScript. It will be improved over the course of several videos with FFT and compute shaders.
This is the second video in the series so far. It's meant to show the logical sequence of steps to convert the discrete Game of Life algorithm into a smoothed out Lenia system.
I don't recommend using this hobby code in games as-is. It is written in GDScript so not very efficient and probably has bugs. Instead, it is intended as a hands-on learning tool for those interested in understanding what makes Lenia different from the Game of Life.
The basis for the video is an excellent OpenLenia Jupiter Notebook tutorial on Google Colab (link below), which brilliantly explains the different steps and reasoning behind them, to change the Game of Life into Lenia. I highly suggest reading through it and checking out the Python code.
STANDING ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS
Lenia was created by Bert Chan and is a continuous generalization of the Game of Life by John Conway.
CHAPTERS
00:00 Intro
02:02 What is Lenia?
03:51 Step By Step
13:14 Orbium in GDScript
14:00 What's Next?
USEFUL LINKS, ATTRIBUTION, AND DEMOS:
Godot Project on GitHub:
https://github.com/ThePathfindersCodex
Lenia Basic Explorable:
https://chakazul.github.io/lenia-CE/lenia.html
Google Colab Interactive Jupyter Notebook:
https://colab.research.google.com/github/OpenLenia/Lenia-Tutorial/blob/main/Tutorial_From_Conway_to_Lenia.ipynb
Downloadable Jupyter Notebooks:
https://github.com/OpenLenia/Lenia-Tutorial
Lenia in Browser with Javascript:
https://chakazul.github.io/Lenia/JavaScript/Lenia.html
General Lenia Wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenia
Game of Life Wiki:
https://conwaylife.com/wiki/