ncase/sim

Relaunch of EMOJI SIMULATOR 😘

Made by Nicky Case

Dedicated to the public domain with Creative Commons Zero! I'm giving away all my art/code/words, so that you teachers, scientists, hobbyists, activists, and emoji-lovers can use them however you like! This is for you. 💜

How To Run This On Your Own Computertron

Yeah basically just download this github repository, and host it on some local server. I use the minimalist http-server, but you can also use MAMP. (Simulating The World is just a bunch of static files, but it needs to be on a server because of some weird browser security issues with XMLHttpRequests)

Saving your own sims locally:

1. Get it running on your own computertron (see above). For the sake of this example, let's assume it's running on http://localhost:8080/. (which it will by default, if you use http-server)
2. Go to http://localhost:8080/, and make your own sim!
3. Click "export model". Your simulation's data should pop up in a new tab.
4. Save it locally to [your local folder]/models, as [your sim name].json. (NOTE: the ".json" extension is important!)
5. Finally, to see your own sim in action, go to http://localhost:8080/?s=[your sim name]! Voilà! And you can keep editing and exporting from there, just copy-paste the new data to [your sim name].json.

Other Peeps' Stuff I Used

They're all open source!

Code Stuff:

• MinPubSub - A tiny publish/subscribe library.
• Perfect Scrollbar - Custom scrollbars. Mostly because Mac OS X Lion is silly and hides all the scrollbars because 'minimalism'.
• requestAnimationFrame shim - A requestAnimationFrame polyfill.
• reqwest - A tiny XMLHttpRequest library.
• Platform.js - To test browser/OS, because there is no good emoji feature detection arrrgghhhhhhhh

Font Stuff:

• Sniglet - For the title splash.
• OpenSansEmoji - Fallback font if your browser doesn't support emoji.

A Narcisstic List of Press This Thing Got

• Jan 8th, 2016: KillScreen
• Jan 7th, 2016: FlowingData
• Jan 5th, 2016: FastCoDesign
• Dec 2nd, 2015: KillScreen (this was written up for my prototype, before the final thing was even done)

sim's Issues

Add note that "world-state isn't saved" to the Save feature to avoid frustration

We tried creating a Gosper glider gun at https://ncase.me/sim/?s=conway and then saving it to share with others.
It seems that the "Save" feature just saves the Rules, and then randomly populates the grid per the World settings.

• If this is intentional, it would be good to add a note to the UI warning people that "the world-state is not saved, just the rules" (or similar), to avoid frustrations.
  • (somewhere around here: https://github.com/ncase/sim/blob/gh-pages/scripts/engine/Editor.js#L104)
• If this is a bug, re-title accordingly!

P.s. Thanks as ever for the great web-tool!

Moving Things have inconsistent behavior when checking for neighbors

Example simulation to demonstrate the issue

If two Things have rules to turn into another Thing when they are next to each other and one of the Things is moving, inconsistent behavior may occur: the moving Thing may not transform.
This behavior holds for two moving Things: one Thing may transform, and the other may not.

When Thing 1 moves next to Thing 2, there is a chance that Thing 2 will turn into Transformed Thing 2 between frames, as Thing 1 moves into the spot next to Thing 2. Thus, on the frame where Thing 1 and Thing 2 would actually be next to each other, Thing 2 may have already transformed, and thus Thing 1 will not transform.

This issue seems to occur at any speed setting.

Add epilepsy warning

For this setting atleast people may gonna need that:

Allow for boolean operators

I don't know if I just oversaw it, but is there any possibility to add boolean operators to the if statements?

For example, in the beach example (https://ncase.me/sim/?s=beach), if I want to add deep water that spawns when all 8 neighbours are water, I'd need something like if exactly 8 neighbours are water OR deep_water. I guess you could work your way around the need for this OR here, but it would be convenient to have.