Ability for Rocklife to open .cells files

[Chronon]

It would be nice to be able to open .cells files, a standard format for representing starting configurations for the Game of Life.  There's a Life Lexicon located here with many samples for download.  It doesn't seem like a very difficult feature to add.  The .cells files are basically an optional comment or two (signified by a "!" character) and a grid of characters. 

The first example from the Life Lexicon that I linked is:

101 (p5) Found by Achim Flammenkamp in August 1994. The name was suggested by Bill Gosper, noting that the phase shown below displays the period in binary.

Here is 101.cells:

Code: [Select]

!Name: 101
!
....OO......OO....
...O.O......O.O...
...O..........O...
OO.O..........O.OO
OO.O.O..OO..O.O.OO
...O.O.O..O.O.O...
...O.O.O..O.O.O...
OO.O.O..OO..O.O.OO
OO.O..........O.OO
...O..........O...
...O.O......O.O...
....OO......OO....

So we need to open the file, strip comments and then start populating the cells in the grid corresponding to the O's.  If I get some time I may work on this.

[Llorean]

Personally, I think mono-bitmaps (or color bitmaps as long as there's black bits, basically any bitmap we can normally load) should be loadable in Life as a starting configuration too.

[yapper]

Bitmap loading sounds like an excellent method.

[Chronon]

Sure.  I just mentioned this method because there's already an extensive library of interesting starting configurations in this format.  Reading a monochrome bitmap in and populating the grid using that information should be the same, in principle.

[Llorean]

And there's a bitmap editor in Rockbox, so it allows you to create your own layouts with less work from a programming perspective, so that's a nice benefit of bitmap loading too. Ideally it'd have support for both formats, of course.

[Chronon]

I posted a patch for reading .cells files here: http://www.rockbox.org/tracker/task/10079

[soap]

I posted a patch for reading .cells files here: http://www.rockbox.org/tracker/task/10079

Now add .cells support to RBUtil. 

[LambdaCalculus]

I posted a patch for reading .cells files here: http://www.rockbox.org/tracker/task/10079

I'll probably commit this later on. This is something I've wanted in Rocklife for quite some time now. Thanks, Chronon!

(EDIT) Committed!

[Chronon]

Thanks.   

--
I might look into bitmap loading, but it will probably be a bit before I get free time.  I also need to read up on C and the plugin API a bit. 

---

Just for fun, here's a Turing Machine implemented in the Game of Life: http://rendell-attic.org/gol/tm.htm