afterlife: the game of life, after hours, ported to the web

[LuxiaSL]

Ports afterlife, the terminal screensaver, to /afterlife, and gives it a tape on channel 10 in oikos.

It's the same program, not an imitation. The engine and the music are method-for-method TypeScript ports of life.py and life_music.py. The page is drawn as a terminal: half-block cells in the same xterm-256 colours curses used, and a status line where every glyph has its own column.

What's here

• afterlife/ is a new Vite + TS project, like syrinx and apeiron. The built bundle is committed to aethera/static/afterlife/.
  • src/engine/ holds InfiniteLife (the infinity engine, the dramaturge, camera, auto-zoom, auto-focus, time dilation, haunted mode), the census (scipy's dilation/label/find_objects, written out), the ticker, and every musing, generated from life.py rather than retyped.
  • src/music/ holds LifeMusicEngine, running in an AudioWorklet that renders the same 2048-frame buffers PyAudio asked for. esbuild bundles the worklet and it's inlined into the page, so there's no second file.
  • src/term/ is the terminal renderer. oikos shares it.
• Server side:
  • aethera/api/afterlife.py and templates/afterlife/viewer.html add the route and the page.
  • The sitemap and urls.txt now list /afterlife.
  • The oikos SITES entry sets tune: True.
• oikos:
  • screens/afterlife.ts runs afterlife's own engine and renderer on a 64×24 terminal. If this browser has a saved universe, the screen adopts it.
  • Also added: a placement (angle 78, channel 10), shelf neighbours, a pane note and a status line.

Changes for the web

• Persistence: the universe is saved in localStorage when the page is hidden or closed, and every 5000 generations. The next visit resumes it with "the universe remembers generation N".
• Opening screen: a splash with the ASCII logo, since browsers only start sound after a gesture.
• Controls:
  • A keys panel (?) that runs every key, for phones.
  • Drag to draw life, right-drag or shift-drag to pan, scroll to zoom. On touch: tap, drag, pinch.
  • A two-line status on narrow screens, so the ticker keeps its room.
  • q goes back to the previous page. Inside oikos it stays put, and the ticker says so.
  • d downloads snapshots.jsonl, and life_stats.csv downloads from the keys panel.
• Bug fix: two display caches are now invalidated on pan, zoom and toggle. In the terminal, changes made while paused didn't show until you unpaused.

Verification

• afterlife/scripts/parity.{py,ts} replays life.py from a seeded genesis, with the injections taken out because their dice can't be shared. Everything matches exactly: every step's population, telemetry, camera, zoom, mood and tempo, then the final ages, the display maps at all five zooms, the census, auto-focus, a pan/zoom, and haunted mode.
• parity_music matches the original engine sample for sample (worst |Δ| 1.8e-7), including the cadence, the style crossfades and the noise bursts.
• uv run pytest -q: 96 passed, including the new tests/test_afterlife.py (the page, the committed bundle, the sitemap entry, the framing headers).
• Screenshots: headless shots of /afterlife (splash, running, stats, haunted, keys, resume, phone) and of oikos (the room, ?contact).
• Performance: about 7 ms per frame at 1920×1080 scale, 15 ms in haunted mode, against a 50 ms frame.

Worth a look

• The music engine matches the Python samples, but no one has listened to it in a browser yet.
• The oikos placement is beside syrinx. Move it if you'd rather it stood elsewhere.
• oikos bundles afterlife/src/{engine,term}, so a change there means rebuilding both. The README says so.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

https://claude.ai/code/session_01VFkU2eSQ39nbuUTQsiVvFK

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Generated by Claude Code