Hi all! Hobby programmer trying out PICO-8 for the first time. Get ready for some hot* lithosphere-on-aesthenosphere action!
I decided to port an old project of mine, a cellular-automaton-based tectonics simulator. It's based on the algorithm used in the 1990 Maxis software toy SimEarth, but has slowly departed from that.
Press Z to toggle map/globe. Press X to start/stop spinning. Left and right change map views to see what the magma is up to underneath, and down pauses the simulation.
Not sure if I'll do any more polishing on this or not, but I'm happy to implement optimizations if there are any that seem obvious to the initiated. I'm especially annoyed by the laggy controls -- any tips on how I should best fetch button state in a slow-running program like this?
The code is messy, in part because I'm new to PICO-8 and Lua, in part because I ported it from a very different language, and in part because I don't mind being a little sloppy! Let me know if I can clear anything up for you.
Thanks for checking it out, and I hope you enjoy.
*1000°+ C
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