Making animated GIFs with ALPACA and kinoje

This document describes a functionality of which the ALPACA reference implementation is capable, but is not a part of the ALPACA specification.

The reference implementation of ALPACA can output one SVG file for each generation of the cellular automaton it has been instructed to evolve.

These SVG files can be rendered and combined with a tool like kinoje to produce an animated GIF.

Create the directories to store intermediate files first:

mkdir instants
mkdir frames

Run ALPACA like:

alpaca eg/life_initial2.alp \
    --display-window='(0,0)-(10,10)' \
    --display-svg \
    --write-discrete-files-to=instants/ \
    --generations 30

Create a kinoje config file life.yaml like:

duration: 3.0
fps: 10.0
width: 20
height: 20
command: inkscape -z -e {outfile} -w {width} -h {height} {infile}

Then run kinoje commands

kinoje-render life.yaml instants/ frames/
kinoje-compile life.yaml frames/ life.gif