ProCreation is a state-of-the-art artificial-life simulator, unlike any other :
• It has an extremely simple, slick interface — all controls are ‘live’.
• It can cope with enormous world sizes — over 4 million cells per 1Mb memory.
• It is blindingly fast — e.g. 17 million cells per second on a 66MHz 601.
• It automatically wraps the world — infinite scrolling in all directions.
The Artificial Life game was originally developed by James Conway and is the basis of hundreds of implementations on every conceivable platform. This is my fourth on the Macintosh!
ProCreation is distributed as a fat application, and requires System 7. It is shareware, and may be included on any archive or CD-ROM as long as the entire package is present.
ProCreation uses a data structure which is optimised both for calculations and screen drawing. The generating algorithm is hand-optimised to under 4 PowerPC instructions per cell. The 680x0 version is far slower, but still pretty zippy.
You can tell how fast ProCreation is working by looking at the updating CPS and FPS statistics in the window. You may be interested to see the speed difference between when the mouse is moving a lot and when it is still.
Set your monitor to black & white mode to achieve the highest frame rates, or 256-colour mode for similar results. If anyone out there has a 604e going at 200 MHz or more, I'd love to hear what speeds you hit.
What are ProCreation's limitations?
ProCreation currently contains only basic capabilities — randomising, editing and calculating. Depending on the response received, I may implement saving, scrolling graphs, rule editing, etc… So let me know if you use it, and remember to pay your shareware fee! If you have any comments or suggestions, I'd love to hear them.
How do I register ProCreation?
Current pricing for ProCreation is $10 for a single-user license, and $100 for a site license. A site license covers any single-building installation, for example a high school or an office. For other terms, please contact author.
To register, run the Register application included with ProCreation. Enter your name, eMail address, postal address and how many single-user or site licenses you require. Save, copy or print out the data and forward to Kagi with payment for processing. If you have any problems, contact me or Kagi which can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.kagi.com/.
Version History
Version 1.1 — 14th January 1996 — Display improvements and speedup.
