{"slug": "show-hn-hexagonal-game-of-life-explorer", "title": "Show HN: Hexagonal Game of Life Explorer", "summary": "A developer released Hexagonal Game of Life Explorer, a browser-based simulator for hexagonal cellular automata built with Rust/WASM, WebGL2, and Web Workers. The open-source webapp allows users to design, clone, mutate, and evolve rulesets with features like rotational symmetry constraints and rule-based cell coloring.", "body_md": "I've been working on this Game of Life Explorer Webapp for a couple of years now (later with LLM assistance). It's a browser-based simulator for hexagonal cellular automata where you can design, clone, mutate and evolve rulesets. I'm using Rust/WASM, WebGL2 and Web Workers to get the highest possible performance despite running on a Web browser. I put a lot of effort and time into fleshing out the functionality to make it as easy and enjoyable to use as possible. Granted it takes a special kind of curiosity to enjoy playing around with Cellular Automata.\n\nThe features I enjoy the most:\n\n- Constraining Rulesets to Rotational Symmetry\n\n- Cloning and Mutating Rulesets\n\n- Coloring Cells based on the Rule that caused their current state\n\nIntentional limitations:\n\n- Hexagonal Grid with a maximum size of 576x666 toroidally wrapped\n\n- binary states\n\n- neighbourhood distance of 1\n\nEverything is 100% open-source, I really appreciate feedback.\n\nComments URL: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48995088](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48995088)\n\nPoints: 1\n\n# Comments: 0", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-hexagonal-game-of-life-explorer", "canonical_source": "https://sidem.github.io/HexLife/", "published_at": "2026-07-21 17:04:23+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-21 17:12:45.160933+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["developer-tools"], "entities": ["Hexagonal Game of Life Explorer"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-hexagonal-game-of-life-explorer", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-hexagonal-game-of-life-explorer.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-hexagonal-game-of-life-explorer.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-hexagonal-game-of-life-explorer.jsonld"}}