Conway's Game of Life

[REMOVE ALL COMMENTS SUCH AS THIS ONE BEFORE CHECKING IN.]

[A good approach to creating the README is to take a stab at it before coding, and then fix it up after coding.]

[You may add additional sections to this file if applicable, e.g. ## Deploying or any other information that a user might find instructive.]

Building

[How to build the program. VS Code part is optional.]

Command line:

make to build. An executable called clife will be produced.
make clean to clean up all build products except the executable.
make pristine to clean up all build products entirely.

VS Code:

The default build task runs make.

Files

[List files here, even if you only have one. Headers are optional.]

main.c: The main code to launch the game
life.c: Code specific to Conway's Life
display.c: Code to related to display
sysdetect.h: Some macros for detecting system capabilities

Data

[Description of the main data used in the program. Just list the major data structures—not every variable.]

There is an 80x24 2D array of Booleans that represents the cells, in row-major order. Additionally, there's a second parallel array used to double-buffer during the next generation computation.

If an array element is True, the cell is alive, otherwise it's dead.

Functions

[This is a tree of functions and their short descriptions]

main()
- init()
  - life_init(): Initializes the cell array to random
    - grid_alloc(): Allocate space for the cell grid
    - randomize(): Randomize the contents of the cell grid
  - display_init(): Initializes the display
    - clear_screen()
- run(): Main game running routine
  - life_update(): Update cell data
    - update_cell(): updates a cell based on its neighbors
      - get_neighbor_count(): counts neighbors for a cell
  - life_get_cells(): Get cell status
  - display_update(): Display cells
    - home_cursor()
  - delay(): Delay between frames
- life_shutdown(): Call before destruction (currently unreachable)
  - grid_free(): Free cell grid memory

Notes

[Any additional notes, bugs, etc.]

^C to quit.
life_init() should allow different kinds of initializations, not just random.
UI could be added so the user could draw patterns.
Maybe add some preprogrammed patterns, spaceships, etc.
Bug: display totally messed up on screens smaller than 80x24

beejjorgensen / clife