The Past
Artipixoids! is half generative art, half artificial life project with a focus on genetic cellular automata obeying energy conservation principle. Started in the end of 2014, the engine has undergone several major modifications, and is still in development. Below, you can see an antology of legacy modifications.
We have several 1-dimensional mods now, but only one of them has an artistic value. It's called Elemafter, and specialize in creating cool vertical patterns and power spectrum images for the subsequent sound generation.
The project was thought as a Flatlander's paradise, but with the growth, it has been extended to 3D, and then down to 1D. Still, 2D is the main dimension we are working at. Below is the history of how 2D mods were developing.
Mod 0 [Dec/2014]
This is the very early attempt to write a CA with energy conservation. The engine was very buggy, it even didn't fully comply the conservation principle. Nevertheless, it produced decent pixel art, so I decided to take some screens of it. Only two of them survived, but recently I found the oldest version in my stash, so new shots of Mod 0 are on their way.
Mod 1 [Jun/2016]
Since Mod 0 I was experimenting a lot with different modifications. None of them had any artistic value though, so they died unborn. Until I was stricken by the idea to add genetic microprograms for each cell. Immediately, they began to play with my imagination, so I made a lot of screenshots and even the very first video showing Artipixoids! in action.
Mod 2 [Jul/2016]
Mod 1 was very glitchy and sharp, so I was continuing to improve the engine, in order to make the effects more nature-like. A lot of meta-parameters were added to the engine, bringing physics to the next level. The engine began to show very diversified behavior, but it had a bug, making the evolution non-deterministic, which also resulted in ugly vertical stripes.
Mod 2a [Sep/2016]
Mod 2c [Feb/2017]
Yes, we already have a full-functioning 3D engine with the interactive environment allowing to explore your growing world in a manner of the good old Descent. The mod is called Mod 3 and is very similar to Mod 2a, just extended to 3 dimensions.
The Future
The project will be split into 3 main parts.
XENTICA
XENTICA is the new aeon goddess of digital universe. Besides, it will be the core framework, allowing us to build new CA modifications and run them on different parallel hardware.
MOIRE
XENTICA will be covered in MOIRE, which is Multi-Objective Interactive Runtime Environment. Generally it is intended to be the user interface, allowing us to run XENTICA models interactively.
VAULT
It would also be nice to have a public place for keeping and sharing all XENTICA mods over the world. VAULT is a good name for it. But honestly, we are not yet sure about details.