game-of-life

A terminal implementation of Conway's Game of Life, a cellular automaton created by mathematician John Conway. This program transforms your terminal into a dynamic playground for exploring various patterns and behaviors within the game.

Features

Customizable Patterns: Choose from a variety of predefined patterns like blinker, toad, beacon, and more.
Dynamic Color Schemes: Personalize your experience with a selection of colors for cells and backgrounds.
Flexible Configuration: Tailor the game's behavior with custom FPS settings and more through a configuration file or command-line arguments.
Responsive Terminal Display: Watch the Game of Life unfold in real-time within your terminal.

Installation

Prerequisites: Ensure you have Go installed on your system.
Getting the Program:
- Clone the repository or download the source code.
- Alternatively, you can directly install the program using Go:
```
go install
```
  This command installs the program into $GOPATH/bin. After installation, you can run the program using game-of-life command in your terminal.

Usage

Running the Game:
- Directly execute the binary after building:
```
./bin/game-of-life
```
- Or, if installed via go install, simply run:
```
game-of-life
```
Command-Line Arguments:
- Optionally, specify a pattern and FPS:
```
game-of-life [pattern] [fps]
```
- Use -h for help:
```
game-of-life -h
```
During the Game:
- Press 'p' to pause/resume the game at the current turn. Once paused you can use 'space' to step through one turn at a time.

Configuration

The program looks for gol-config.json in the current directory or the default configuration location based on your system (e.g., /Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/gol/gol-config.json for MacOS, and /home/<username>/.config/gol/ for Linux file systems).

A sample configuration file:

{
    "preset": "random",
    "cell-color": "gray",
    "background-color": "white",
    "scale-factor": 1,
    "fps": 23
}

To find out the configuration directory path, use:

game-of-life cl

Available Patterns

The game supports various patterns which are case-sensitive:

blinker, toad, beacon, lwss, gosper-glider-gun, glider, block, random

Color Options

You can choose from a range of supported colors for cells and background:

black, maroon, green, olive, navy, purple, teal, silver, gray, red, lime, yellow, blue, fuchsia, aqua, white

Building from Source

To compile the program:

go build -o bin/game-of-life

This command generates an executable in the bin directory.

You can also build and run in one step:

go build -o bin/game-of-life && ./bin/game-of-life

References and Acknowledgements

tcell Library: This project leverages the tcell library for managing terminal graphics and events.
Conway's Game of Life: Learn more about the original concept on Wikipedia.
cli Package: Command-line interactions are powered by the cli package.

dmcg310 / game-of-life