This is just an experiment. It is a cellular automaton similar to game of life but the dead cells cannot suddenly become alive. Instead, alive cells can spawn cells near them. For that matter, alive cells can also kill cells near them. And each cell that is alive has some "DNA" that defines what it will do based on the state of its 8 neighboring cells. When cells decide to spawn new cells next to them, they inherit the same DNA with some random mutations.
In contrast to the game of life, the world is not updated all at once. Cells are asked to "think" and update the table one after the other and the effects of their decisions are immediate. But I avoid asking neighboring cells one after the other
The colors that you see are based on what this cell would do in a specific, arbitrarily selected situation. They don't mean anything useful but they are usually handy for tracking relatives.
I want to run this for some time to see if any structure will emerge out of the chaos; if there is a DNA that describes a stable strategy.
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If you are on linux you can use firejail to launch PICO-8 sandboxed. That way PICO-8 cannot access all your files, only those in its directory and its configuration directory.
I assume that you have the PICO-8 binaries in ~/pico-8 and that you are using the default config directory ~/.lexaloffle
I also assume that you are saving screenshots in the ~/pico-8 directory and not on your Desktop. To do that you need to edit the "desktop_path" line in your ~/.lexaloffle/pico-8/config.txt to be like this:
desktop_path /home/username/pico-8/screenshots/
Replace "username" with your actual Linux username for the rest of this post.
Now, install firejail from your repositories (sudo apt install firejail) or download a newer version from their website (up to you)
Create a file called pico8.profile in ~/.config/firejail
Put the following in this file:
include default.local
include globals.local
noblacklist ${HOME}/.lexaloffle
noblacklist ${HOME}/pico-8
include disable-common.inc
include disable-devel.inc
include disable-interpreters.inc
include disable-programs.inc
whitelist ${HOME}/.lexaloffle
whitelist ${HOME}/pico-8
include whitelist-common.inc
include whitelist-var-common.inc
apparmor
caps.keep sys_chroot,sys_admin
netfilter
nodbus
nodvd
nogroups
notv
?BROWSER_DISABLE_U2F: nou2f
shell none
disable-mnt
private-dev
private-tmp
#noexec ${HOME}
noexec /tmp
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Then you can lunch pico like this from its directory:
firejail pico8
Or, assuming you use MATE, you can create a file in /home/username/.local/share/applications/ with any filename (as long as the extension is ".desktop" I suppose) and these contents:
#!/usr/bin/env xdg-open [Desktop Entry] Version=1.0 Type=Application Terminal=false Icon=/home/username/pico-8/lexaloffle-pico8.png Icon[en_US]=/home/username/pico-8/lexaloffle-pico8.png Name[en_US]=PICO-8 Exec=firejail /home/username/pico-8/pico8 Name=PICO-8 |
and now you will have a menu shortcut to start
The desktop file may work with other desktop environments. If not you can always use the menu editor that comes with your distro. The important part is making sure that you are executing firejail with the full path to pico8 as an argument.
To verify that you are running pico8 in the proper sandbox you can open a console and try to start it up by running
firejail /home/username/pico-8/pico8
You should see something like:
Reading profile /home/username/.config/firejail/pico8.profile
I will try to make the sandbox even tighter in the future.
If you boot up PICO-8 like this:
./pico8 -home $(cd .; pwd)/data/ |
Then the splore command has a weird bug: Updating the "New" page shows nothing in the "New" page and instead the "Featured" page shows the results that were fetched from the "New" category!
This bug is not present if you boot PICO-8 normally without a custom home dir.
(Also, the above weird $(cd .; pwd) command is the only way I've found that will allow me to make a portable version of PICO-8. Using "." will break the "cd" command in PICO-8 so I have to construct and pass an absolute path. Which is a second bug, perhaps I should open another thread about that.)
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Be patient, bists sometimes take a long time to evolve. There is a speedup option in the help/menu page that you can use if you can't wait.
You can also join the game and try to outlive the oldest bist or try put evolutionary pressure on them (e.g kill some while you are red, and soon bists will be avoiding red bists)
Make sure to check out all the the options that can be found in the menu in the help/menu screen.
If you evolve any interesting brains paste them here! You can save to the clipboard the brain of the oldest bist by opening the help/opts page finding "SAVE TO CLIP".
Every now and then bists will play a custom cry which is 100% based on the parameters of their brain. You can also listen to the cry of the oldest bist by saving it.
To load a brain and add it to the game just ctrl+v in PICO-8, then open the help/menu page look into the menu for the "ADD FROM CLIP" option.
I am mostly done adding new features unless someone has more ideas. I may release a bugfix version if I notice any bugs though.
EDIT: Spoke too quickly. I added a family tree in the help page.
Enjoy!
