cellar

A fast, unbounded cellular-automata editor and visualizer.
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Life	Gray-Scott	Lenia

cellar steps an unbounded world on the GPU with compute shaders, falls back to every CPU core where it must, and switches to HashLife for patterns that need billions of generations. It is written in Mach on the boom engine.

Features

• Unbounded world. A sparse pool of 64 by 64 chunks grows in any direction, stepped and drawn on the GPU without a round trip to the CPU.
• HashLife. Gosper's algorithm takes a Gosper gun to generation 2^30 in a moment.
• Many rule families.
  • Life-like and Larger-than-Life rules with weighted kernels up to radius 16 (B3/S23, R5,C0,M1,S34..58,B34..45,NM)
  • Generations (B2/S/C3, Brian's Brain)
  • isotropic non-totalistic and MAP rules (B2-a/S12)
  • Golly .rule tables and trees (WireWorld, Langton's Loops)
  • Lenia (R=13,T=10,b=[1],m=0.15,s=0.015, Orbium)
  • Gray-Scott reaction-diffusion (F=0.029,k=0.057)
  • bounded tori, planes, Klein bottles and cross-surfaces (B3/S23:T100,100)
• Editing. Draw, erase, stamp, select, walls and bounds, with undo and redo across every change.
• A pattern library of about three hundred classic Life patterns, Lenia creatures and reaction-diffusion seeds.
• Golly-compatible files. RLE, plaintext, Life 1.05 and 1.06 and Macrocell, plus RLW, cellar's format for exact continuous values. Copy and paste RLE straight to and from LifeWiki or Golly.
• Headless runs and benchmarks from the command line.

Install

Release archives for linux (x86-64 and arm64), windows (x86-64) and macOS (x86-64 and Apple silicon) are on the releases page.

cellar needs a Vulkan 1.2 GPU with buffer device addresses. On macOS that is MoltenVK. If it runs slowly, see troubleshooting.

Usage

cellar                       # open the editor
cellar pattern.rle           # open a world, pattern or .rule file
cellar run gun.rle --gens 1000 --out gun.mc    # run headless
cellar --bench gpu dense     # measure an engine

Press H or F1 in the app for the key reference. Space plays and pauses, S steps, R randomizes, scroll zooms and the right mouse button pans.

Settings, saved worlds and screenshots live in ~/.local/share/cellar on linux, ~/Library/Application Support/cellar on macOS and %APPDATA%\cellar on windows.

The guide covers every rule family, the controls, file formats, headless runs and the bench in full.

Build

Requires Mach 6.10.1 or newer and a C compiler for GLFW, which mach-glfw builds from source (on linux, the X11 and Wayland development headers and wayland-scanner).

git clone https://github.com/octalide/cellar
cd cellar
mach dep pull .   # realize the pinned std, boom, image and their dependencies
mach build .
mach run .
mach test .

On macOS, pass --pie to mach build and mach run.

License

MIT, see LICENSE.