Pixel-art-style Conway's game-of-life using a tile shader in WebGL

Implementation of Conway's game of life cellular automata with a retro-style shader. Added as example on webgpgpu Github.

[view in browser]

[smaller version for mobile]

Sketch of WebGL implementation:

• Underlying cellular automata runs Conway's game of life
• States as game tiles: new cells: small blue; live cells: blue; died: skulls
• Life diffuses out coloring nearby areas
• A single RGBA texture stores the game state. We render to/from this texture as a framebuffer.
• Each color channel in [0,1] can be mapped to a [0,255] byte value
• The green channel stores the game of life state
• The blue channel stores the diffusing field
• The red channel outputs a tile ID value that is passed to a tile shader to render the game

Retro-styled forest-fire cellular automata in WebGL

Added as example on webgpgpu Github.

This is a cellular automata analogue of the model that we used for developmental retinal waves in this paper. 

[view in browser]

Key rules

• Vegetation "grows" occasionally (flip a coin to increment amount of trees)
• Fires have a small chance of starting spontaneously
• Intensity of ignited fires decay down to zero, at which point they leave ash
• Fires spread to adjacent cells with a probability that depends on their intensity
• Probability of a cell igniting given a fire is related to how much vegetation there is

Sketch of WebGL implementation:

• A single RGBA texture stores the game state
• Each color channel in [0,1] can be mapped to a [0,255] byte value
• A "noise" texture creates pseudorandom numbers
• The green channel stores the level of vegetation (BURNT,NONE,GRASS,SCRUB,TREE)
• The blue channel stores the intensity of the fire
• The red channel outputs a tile ID value that is passed to a tile shader to render the game