ertyumpx / game-of-life

Simple simulation of infamous Conway's Game of Life with C++ using SDL2

Conway's Game of Life

I believe it was the fastest project I've ever done which took around 1.5 hours.

Infamous Conway's Game of Life implemented in C++ with SDL2.

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License

This project is licensed under the GNU GPL-3.0 license.

Feel free to use the source code. Referring to the repository would be very much appreciated.

Setup

Project is currently compiled with GNU G++ 13.2.1.

The only third-party dependency is SDL2. Used version of SDL2 in project is 2.28.5, should work as long as it is SDL2 and not SDL.

For compiling and linking rules GNU Make 4.4.1 was used. After downloading dependencies, make sure to change the include paths inside the Makefile.

# change the paths for '-I' 
CC := g++
CFLAGS := -Wall -std=c++11 -I/usr/include/SDL2           # here
TEST_CFLAGS := -Wall -std=c++11 -Iinclude/SDL2 -Isrc/    # and here
LDFLAGS := -lSDL2 -lSDL2_image
...

After fulfilling dependencies, download or clone the project and use Makefile to easily compile:

> make all
> make run

Since SDL2 is a cross-platform media library, output should work on Windows, MacOS and Linux.

Rules

The simulation goes in a 2D grid where each cell can be either dead or alive. The rules are as follows:

• Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies, as if by underpopulation.
• Any live cell with two or three live neighbors lives on to the next generation.
• Any live cell with more than three live neighbors dies, as if by overpopulation.
• Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbors becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.

Directly taken from the Wikipedia page of the Conway's Game of Life.

General Structure

Directory Structure and Files

• src/ directory contains the source code
  • src/main.cpp is the entry point of the program
  • src/game.hpp contains the declarations of the methods
  • src/game_of_life.cpp contains the implementation
• stable/ directory contains the stable output
  • stable/game.life is the executable

How It Goes

Current version is not designed specifically to be used anywhere. Without any arguments, it will create a grid according to the WIDTH, HEIGHT and CELL_SIZE constants in main.cpp, randomly fill a grid and start the simulation.

The constant FPS is the frame rate of the simulation. It is set to 15 by default.

game-of-life's Issues

Interactive Grid

We can add quite simple mouse events and change the status of the cells by clicking on them.

• Right click would make the cell alive
• Left click would make the cell dead

Setting an Image as a Seed

Quite unnecessary concept, but made me say "Why not?"

We could take a random image, convert it to grayscale, size it as our grid and take average of the pixel groups; if the color average is above %50 the cell would be alive.