- Technically yes, since you can set custom rules that may include something like “a dead cell needs 0 living neighbors to come alive”, so just because of that, knowing the state of every cell is important. In practice, when using actual sensible rules (like the standard one), a dead cell that doesn’t have any living neighbors will definitely stay dead on the next frame as well, so only keeping track of living cells and their neighbors would actually be more efficient, yeah
- Well, the number of rows and columns can be customised as well, but my recommended standard is around 200 x 120 (so 24k cells in total.) With my old code, the frametime for that size was around 15ms. The maximum I allow is 480 x 480 (230k cells), which got around 170ms. Makes sense
- I actually found out what the big performance issue is, and the computing part of the equation is actually not an issue at all, it’s the DRAWING. For some reason, I made it so that every cell is drawn individually, no matter if living or dead. I changed the code to only draw living cells, which resulted in a massive performance boost. That being said, drawing every living cell on every frame is probably still pretty dumb. Idk
thank you for the help, though!