jdwije/game-of-life.js

A JavaScript implementation of John Conway's Game of Life simulation. Create some shapes, watch them evolve.

Game of Life [GOL]

John Conway's famous 1970 cellular automation. Create some shapes, watch them evolve.

DEMO

This is a reproduction of Conway's famous Game of Life simulation. It currently supports HTML and HTML5 Canvas canvas output - maybe I will add desktop support through GNUGuile or NodeJS at a later date.

For more information on the original experiment see here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_Game_of_Life.

Setup In-Browser

For clarities sake I will talk you through how I setup the demo page for this script available here.

First include the dist/game-of-life-min.js in your webpages' body.

	<script type="text/javascript" src="../dist/game-of-life.js"></script>

Initialisation is easy however this script supports two output types in browser and we need to choose one. For this example we will setup both vanilla HTML and HTML5 canvas output. In your webpage below where you linked the above script insert something like this.

<script type="text/javascript">
		var HTML, HTML5;
		// wrap init in window load funtion
		$(window).load(function () {
			// setup simulator for canvas output.
			simHTML5 = new GolController({
				'canvas' : 'canvas',
				'width' : 100,
				'height' : 100,
				'seed_density' : 20
			}),
			// setup simulator for HTML output. note the 'display' : 'HTML' property.
		    simHTML =  new GolController({
				'canvas' : 'pre',
				'selector' : 'pre',
		        'display' : 'HTML',
				'width' : 70,
				'height' : 70,
				'seed_density' : 30
			});
		});
	</script>

For a full list of the available settings see src/objects/gol-controller.js and look at the configDefaults variable.

You will need to link the controller we just intialised to a user interface using the functions it provides.

You can begin your simulation by calling

	simHTML.run();

and stop it with

	simHTML5.stop()

The script doesn't make you use any particular frameworks to build up your UI with. It will work with jQuery, Dojo, etc. The example uses the jQuery click() event functions to bind some buttons to the controllers' API.

API

start

begins the simulation. Usage:

	mySim.start();

suspend

suspends a running simulation, does not destroy data and allows for resuming. Usage:

	mySim.suspend();

rebuild

resets the simulation and feeds it a new seed matrix. Usage:

	mySim.rebuild();

Building & Contributing

If you would like to build this project you will need to have the following installed:

1. NodeJS
2. NPM

Follow the links to get started. NPM comes installed with NodeJS these days but check it out anyway in case you're unfamilier. Once you're ready, open up a terminal in your project folder:

# clone repo

# make direcotry for local project and clone remote repo
mkdir gol
cd gol
git clone [email protected]:jdwije/game-of-life.js.git .

# install node dependencies via NPM
npm install

# build with grunt
grunt --force

After you can make a build you can edit the source code files in the src/ directory. The src/objects directory contains all the core JS objects you will be wanting to edit and prototype.

The tests directory contains some modularized in browser tests of the various objects that might prove useful.

Send me pull requests to contribute back upstream.

Known Issues

The original GOL simulation was run in a pottentially infinite canvas space. This is not practical in a graphical browser environment as there are hard limits on resources, as such the engine in this software enforces a height/width limit for it's calculations.

The HTML5 canvas display adapter suffers from some performance issues.

There seems to be a lot of idle time in the program. I might split this up in future versions by refactoring in more asynchronous methods or threaded processes when available.

The build is a bit crappy. Currently needs the --force flag to complete, I'll fix this when I get around to some unit tests.

---

Change Log

A history of changes from version to version.

0.1.1

FIXED: readme file

ADDED: better documentation of build and other things

0.1.0

REMOVED: jQuery dependencies dropped in favour of vanilla JS.

EDITED: Refactored code to be more modular.

ADDED: Grunt build system.

EDITIED: Directory/source code structure to support the project better and make things clearer.

0.0.1

ADDED: beta source code and supporting files to repositiory.

---

License

MIT licensed. See LICENSE.md file distributed with this source code.

game-of-life.js's Issues

Improve Demo Page

• link back to Github repository.
• some nicer colours etc.
• make it a bit more descriptive
• give it a share on hacker news or something when done!

File Cleanup

If it doesn't use workers it doesn't need the worker.js files!

Also emacs garbage needs to go...

Instrumentation

It would be really useful to have some inbuilt instrumentation in the code to benchmark performance improvements made.

Port To Desktop

Could be done using either NodeWebKit or GNU Guile. Some changes to the core JS code will be required.

Fix the build

The grunt build requires the --force flag currently to run properly. This should be fixed and more of it capabilities used in general.

Unit-Tests

Some nice little unit tests for the engine etc.