John Conway's Game of Life

Hi! And thanks for showing interest in my repo. As the description says, this is a simple implmentation of John Conway's Game of Life I decided to make over a weekend.

How to run

Dependencies

In order to compile and run the program you're going to need:

• A Linux system or Linux VM.
• Header files for the POSIX threads and SDL2 libraries.

Any other dependencies of the program should be available on any Linux distribution, as it mostly uses Standard Library stuff.

Compilation Instructions

• Create a target directory in the root of this repository.
• Invoke make from the root of this repository.

The compiled binary will then be available to you in target/GameOfLife.

Usage

The program can be invoked in the following ways:

• target/GameOfLife: The program will begin the game with a randomized initial state.
• target/GameOfLife <FILE_PATH>: The program will begin, using the state defined by the text file located in <FILE_PATH>.
• target/GameOfLife --create | -c <FILE_PATH>/<FILE_NAME>: The program will generate a randomized initial state file of name <FILE_NAME> in <FILE_PATH>.
• target/GameOfLife --help | -h: Prints the program ussage manual to stdout.

Input files

The input files for initial states are stored as plain text. An input file consists solely of a matrix of 1s and 0s where a 1 indicate the position is alive and 0 indicates it's dead. For example, a 10x10 grid for a beacon pattern would translate into the following input file:

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

In its current state the program only supports working on a 50x50 grid. However, one of the next goals is the add the ability to specify the grid dimmensions via command line arguments.

Iteration Ideas:

This is more of a personal section so I can keep track of the things I want to implement later on. Following iterations of the project would add:

• Ability to specify grid-dimmensions via command line arguments.
• Ability to specify thread-count via command-line arguments.
• Ability to modify the probability of a cell being alive when generating initial states via command-line arguments
• Ability to specify the time delta between generations via command-line arguments
• Ability to pause/unpause the game by clicking on the display window.