Ritual Descent, But On An Amiga

Got AMOS Professional running tonight for the first time in about 25 years.

Rather than doing anything sensible with it, I decided to see how much of Ritual Descent I could force through an Amiga.

At the moment, that means:

100 white pixels pretending to be fish.

They move.

Not very boids yet.

But they move.

Back in the 90s I used to mess about with Conway’s Game of Life and little bits of code where you gave things a few simple rules and watched what happened.

That part still interests me.

Not drawing every movement.
Not telling everything exactly where to go.
Just making the conditions, then seeing what turns up.

That same idea is all through Ritual Descent: Emergence now.

The modern version has thousands of fish moving around under Harrowden, forming shoals, splitting apart, reacting to the space and occasionally making patterns that look far more deliberate than they actually are.

So I thought:

What happens if I strip the whole thing right back and try it on an Amiga?

At the moment each fish is one pixel with a position and a direction.

Basically this:

X(F)=X(F)+DX(F)
Y(F)=Y(F)+DY(F)

Plot X(F),Y(F),1

High technology.

Next I want to add invisible currents across the screen, so different parts of the reservoir push the fish in different directions.

Then attraction.
Repulsion.
Disturbances.
Places they avoid.

Hopefully it eventually gets to the point where the screen looks like it’s barely doing anything, then suddenly the fish start gathering into something.

A spiral.
A gap.
A line.
Some shape that seems important for a few seconds.

Then it falls apart again.

I’m not really trying to make a tiny copy of the modern version.

The limitation is the interesting bit.

Black screen.
White pixels.
Simple rules.
See what happens.

I’m not especially interested in recreating what I was doing 25 years ago either.

I’m more interested in taking an old, limited machine and forcing a current piece of work through it to see what comes out the other side.

Same problem. Worse tools. Different result.

For now though: 100 white pixels under Harrowden.

Progress. 🐟