canvaslife

Conway's Game of Life implemented in HTML5 canvas. canvaslife.js takes care of displaying and calculating the various states of the Game of Life universe, and allows you to interact with it through JavaScript.

Demo

See a full demo at http://www.julianpulgarin.com/canvaslife/, including over 1200 interesting patterns.

Setup

To start with, you need to include jQuery, and canvaslife.js, like so:

<head>
…
<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.5.1/jquery.js"></script>
<script src="http://jpulgarin.github.com/canvaslife/canvaslife.js"></script>
…
</head>

You also need a <canvas> element which canvaslife.js will use to display the grid of cells:

<body>
…
<canvas id="universe" width="900" height="500">
…
</body>

Finally you need to initialize the Game of Life Universe and tell it which canvas element to use, like so:

<script type="text/javascript">
$('document').ready(function() {
	life.initUniverse('#universe');
});
</script>

Usage

You can populate the grid by click and dragging your mouse to revive/kill cells.

You can also interact with the Game of Life Univese through JavaScript, via the life and graphics objects.

life

'life' object properties

life.xCells - Number of cells per row.

life.yCells - Number of cells per column.

life.speed - An integer representing the speed at which the universe is evolving. 1000 being the slowest, and 0 being the fastest.

life.universe - A two dimensional array of booleans, representing the current alive/dead state of all cells in the universe. When making changes to this array ensure that life.isAlive() returns false so that your changes are not overriden by the next generation being calculated.

'life' object methods

life.initUniverse(canvasSelector) - Initializes a Game of Life universe. canvasSelector should be a jQuery selector that matches to the desired canvas element.

life.loadPattern(url) - Loads a Run Length Encoded format Game of Life pattern file from the specified url into the universe.

life.toggleLife() - Toggle whether the universe is in an envolving or static state.

life.isAlive() - Returns true if the universe is evolving, and false if it is static.

life.nextGen() - Evolve the universe one generation forward.

life.clear() - Kills all cells in the universe.

life.changeSpeed(faster) - Increases the speed of the universe if faster is true, and decreases it if faster is false.

graphics

'graphics' object methods

graphics.paint() - Paint the current state of the universe.

richlanc / canvaslife