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= oo THE HACK OF LIFE oo =
= o oo o =
= o o An Out of Challenge 7DRL o =
= ooo o o by Barry Peddycord oo =
= o o ooo oo =
= o ishara@isharacomix.com oo =
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HISTORY:
The Game of Life is a cellular automaton developed by the British
Mathemetician John Horton Conway in 1970. [from wikipedia]
Life is a zero-player "game" where the "player" sets up a board that
consists of living and dead cells, and then once the game is started,
the board comes to life and runs based on the initial configuration
following a set of five simple rules.
FOR EVERY GENERATION:
* A cell is either alive or dead.
* Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies, as if caused
by underpopulation.
* Any live cell with more than three live neighbors dies, as if by
overcrowding.
* Any live cell with two or three live neighbors lives on to the next
generation.
* Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbors becomes a live cell.
Implementing these rules in a software environment is a comparatively
trivial task and is presented as a project for many introductory computer
science students. However, the simple nature of the game belies its
computational significance.
The 'language' of the Game of Life is, in fact, Turing Complete, which
means that any problem in the world that can be computed, can be computed
using nothing but the Game of Life and a single initial configuration.
This is proven in other documents, and you are encouaraged to check them
out if you are interested in automata and computability theory.
WHAT IS THIS?
Considering how Life is a zero-player game, it makes it lots of fun as a
curiosity, but makes it very easy for people who are not life enthusiasts
to quickly become bored after watching yet another glider explode.
So this decides to put the Game back in the Game of Life. And it does that
by taking the interface of the RogueLike genre of computer games and
terribly abusing it. The name of the game is adopted from the RogueLike
giant NetHack, resulting in the Hack of Life.
First of all, a few small additions to the rules are necessary.
FOR EVERY GENERATION:
* A cell is either alive or dead.
* Every live cell either has a color, or is colorless (white).
* Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies, as if caused
by underpopulation.
* Any live cell with more than three live neighbors dies, as if by
overcrowding.
* Any live cell with two or three live neighbors lives on to the next
generation.
* If the majority of the colored live neighbors share the same
color, then the cell in question will adopt the new color.
* A live cell will never adopt colorlessness.
* Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbors becomes a live cell.
* If the majority of the colored live neighbors share the same
color, then the cell in question will adopt the new color.
* If there is a tie among the colored neighbors, then the cell will
be born colorless.
This game of life supports six players, plus the colorless no-player.
In the original Game of Life, the board remains in stasis while the player
sets it up. However, in this game, the board is being altered as it is
running. To do this, each player controls a generator, a device that can
plant, harvest, and hatch cells.
The generator can take the following actions:
* Move in one of 8 directions, or stay in place.
y k u
h . l (Alternatively, you may use the arrow keys for hjkl)
b j n
* Plant a seed in one of 8 directions or where it is standing.
Y K U
H > L
B J N
* Harvest a live cell or seed of its own color where it is standing.
,
* Hatch all seeds on the map of its color remotely.
SPACE
Other, non-game actions include:
* Quit the game. If playing as a guest in a multiplayer game, your
cells will become colorless.
Q
* Look around the map.
Toggle with 'w'. When looking around, a [V] will appear in the
status window.
* Enter stasis mode where generators can move without the cells
iterating over their generations.
Toggle with 'e'. Available only if SANDBOX is activated. When in
stasis, an [S] will appear in the status window.
* Start/stop message logging to a text file in the current directory.
This allows you to record conversations
in network play.
a
* Save a bitmap representation of the board to the current directory.
s
* Save a challenge bitmap representation of the board to the current
directory so the board can be loaded in challenge mode.
S
* End the game and return to the Main Menu. In a network game, 'Q'
surrenders but allows you to remain as a spectator. 'X' actually
terminates the game.
X
* Display the rules of the current game. Very useful in multiplayer. :)
?
* Enter chat mode/send chat message.
ENTER
Each of these actions take one generation of game time to act. All players
take their turns simultaneously. Players move first, then the cells advance
a generation, and finally, seeds hatch if they were not destroyed.
A generator has a store of 100 seeds. These seeds can be planted anywhere
on the map. A seeded cell counts, for all intents and purposes, as a dead
cell. It will immediately grow into a new cell if it has neighbors (which
will destroy the seed), and it does not count as a live neighbor itself.
The generator can then hatch all of the seeds of its color on the map, and
they will instantly become live cells and start growing from generation to
generation. Due to the time it takes to plant the seeds, smaller patterns
that can be planted in quick amounts of time are preferably to large,
complicated patterns.
When the generator starts running out of seeds, it can harvest its own
cells to restock. Therefore, combinations that indefinitely create new
cells can be used as farms to restock. If your have no seeds, and there
are no living cells on the grid, your generator is kicked out of the game.
The object of the game is simple - after a set amount of time, see to it
that the map consists of more cells of your color than any other color.
Generators are represented on the map as colored '@' symbols. Seeds are
shown as '.' symbols, and live cells appear as 'o' symbols. Your cells can
be distinguished from other by both the color and that your cells are shown
in boldface. If you have a hard time seeing color, or your terminal does
not support it, you can change the option SERIAL GLYPHS which will display
other players' symbols as letters and numbers.
'-' symbols represent cells that are off the grid.
RUNNING THE GAME:
For those of you running windows, simply go into the windows folder and
run the hackoflife.exe file. I've not tested it on Windows, so I don't know
how well it works. If you encounter problems when running it, please send
me a bug report.
For the rest of you, hopefully you can compile it from source. To do that,
ensure that you have ncurses installed. Then open a terminal in this
directory and run the command:
./configure && make
If you are running an older machine that does not support IPv6, you may
either get an error message or simply not be allowed to start network
games. If that's the case, then run:
./configure --without-ipv6
You should have gotten a big list of gibberish and then ended up back at
the command line. From there, try to run:
./hackoflife
If that works, then congratulations! If not, just send me an e-mail and
I'll do what I can to figure what happened.
PLAYING THE GAME:
The game comes in 4 play styles.
CONQUEST : Play through a course of randomly generated maps and try
to eliminate all of the cells of the other colors.
(Opponents do not use generators in this mode)
CHALLENGE : Same as conquest, but starts the game with a preloaded
configuration as opposed to a randomly generated one.
(Opponents do not use generators in this mode)
HOTSEAT : Test your wits against up to five other human opponents
on a blank or preconfigured field.
NET PLAY : Same as hotseat, but less risk of dying due to
overcrowding.
The game features a numerous different parameters that can be altered to
control the game. You can set these to different values to make the
single-player mode easier or more difficult, or to shake up the multiplayer
mode with different rules.
MY COLOR : Choose the color that you would like to represent
your cells. This will have no effect on the color
that you appear to other players, as colors are
assigned to other players randomly (local parameter
only).
SERIAL GLYPHS : When true, instead of displaying all opposing cells
as '.' and 'o' symbols, the cells will instead by
shown as capital letters for live cells (A,B,C...)
and lowercase letters for seeds (a,b,c...). Their
generators appear as numerals (1,2,3...). This is
useful if your terminal does not have color support
(local parameter only).
SPACED GRID : Adds a space between columns of cells to make the
terminal more square-like (local parameter only).
TERMINAL WIDTH : Asserts the horizontal length of the terminal in
cells (local parameter only).
TERMINAL HEIGHT : Asserts the vertical length of the terminal in cells
(local parameter only).
STARTING SEEDS : The number of seeds each generator starts with. Set
this to 0 to start with an infinite number.
MAX SEEDS : The maximum number of seeds a generator can carry.
GRID WIDTH : The width of the board in cells. Upper limit of 10K.
GRID HEIGHT : The height of the board in cells. Upper limit of 10K.
NOTE: The maximum board size is 10000x10000, which results in
100000000 (.1 billion) elements. On my computer, the
calculation of the next grid takes 10 seconds. Take this
into consideration when setting this option.
GRID WRAP : When enabled, the top of the grid is considered a
neighbor to the bottom of the grid, and the left to
the right.
NOISE : When enabled, the field starts off with random
colorless cells.
OTHER CELLS : Set the properties of cells that are not your color.
PASSIVE : You can move your generator on top of other
colored cells.
SOLID : You may not move over other cells.
DEADLY : Touching a cell of another color will put you
out of the game.
TIMEOUT : The amount of time a player has to take their turn.
When the timer runs out, the player is forced to
'wait'. This is a value measured in milliseconds.
Setting this value very low can create a 'realtime'
game of life, where turns move very quickly.
Setting it to zero blocks turn times indefinitely.
NET HANG : The amount of time that the game should wait for a
peer to respond to a required request before killing
the connection. If you're playing on a laggy network,
you may wish to set this a little higher.
GENERATIONS : The number of generations before the game ends. The
winner is the player who owns the most cells on the
grid. Set to 0 for an unlimited game.
RULES : The set of rules for the game.
SURVIVAL : The game ends after a set number of generations
pass. The winner is the player with the most of
his color on the map.
EXTERMINATION : The game ends after all of the cells on the map
of a color have been exhausted. Players may not
harvest cells in this mode.
PROLIFERATION : The game ends when one color covers one third
of the grid.
SANDBOX : A rule-less version of the game for people who
want to use it as a singleplayer/multiplayer Life
exploring program. This enables stasis mode to be
toggled with the 'e' key.
RULESTRING : Allows you set up your own Survival/Birth rules
to play things other than Conway's original
S23/B3 game. Simply select the sets of numbers
that you want to rule the game world.
The rulestring is a set of 18 values, each a
number between 0 and 100. The number represents
the percentage of Survival/Birth occuring when
the number of neighbors is a certain value. If
all of these values are either 0 or 100, then
the Game of Life will proceed deterministically.
If you want to make fuzzy room where chance might
be considered (quantum life?), then feel free to
set them to other values.
NETWORK PLAY:
Network play allows multiple Life enthusiasts to play together either in
a competitive match or simply in a sandbox. Network play works as follows:
* One player chooses HOST NETWORK GAME.
* The rest of the players JOIN NETWORK GAME.
* Once the host has enough players, he starts the game up. The other
players see the breakdown of his rules before starting up. The game
then begins.
* Players can chat by pressing enter. Simply enter your message and
press enter again to send the message. All messages are visible by
everyone.
* If you try to host a game and the system simply returns to the main
menu without letting other players connect, check to make sure your
computer supports IPv6. If it doesn't, recompile the game without
IPv6.
LICENSE:
The Hack of Life is Free Software released under the GNU General Public
License, version 3. This file is included in the file titled COPYING.
Feel free to share and modify. If you have any trouble, comments, or
suggestions regarding the program, shoot me an e-mail.
DISCLAIMER:
THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY
APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT
HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY
OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO,
THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
PURPOSE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM
IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF
ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION.
RESOURCES:
The Internet has a whole culture devoted the the Game of Life and Cellular
Automata. Here are a few links for those of you who may be interested.
The Jargon file entry for the Game of Life. Hackers only. :)
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/L/life.html
Wikipedia, the ultimate authority for everything in the world, has a good
article.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life
The Conway Life home page with tons of resources for Life enthusiasts,
including its own wiki full of interesting tidbits of information.
http://www.conwaylife.com/
The Life Lexicon is a list of all of the terms and jargon associated with
Life.
http://www.argentum.freeserve.co.uk/lex_home.htm
