Conway's Game of Life

This is an implementation of Conway's Game of Life, made using Zig (compiled to WASM) and the canvas API.

Build Instructions

This game was built with Zig 0.6.0+df1a2ecd3. Make sure you have at least that version or newer. As Zig is still pre-1.0, the build may break. Please file an issue if the build breaks!

Anyway, once you have Zig installed, do the following:

$ git clone https://github.com/leroycep/game-of-life.git --recursive
$ cd game-of-life
$ zig build wasm
$ # Run some kind of http server, I use the python livereload
$ livereload zig-cache/www/

Then open up the webpage in a browser.

Also note the --recursive. This flag tells git to automatically download submodules, which I use to depend on zee_alloc.

Future Features

This project was originally done as part of a Computer Science build week at Lambda School. I had a bunch of features that I wanted to implement, and of course I couldn't do everything in a week, especially since I implemented the GUI code mostly from scratch. Here's a list of what I might add in the future, given I have the time.

• Infinite Grid
  • I had a plan to split the grid into a bunch of chunks, and then only keep active chunks loaded.
  • This would've been so cool! But I decided to focus on making the app more usable first
  • This is now implemented! The world is split into chunks and only active chunks are kept loaded. :)
• Saving and Loading Worlds
• Importing and Exporting schematics
  • I wanted some way of sharing cool designs with other people
  • The clipboard system was the first step towards this
• Rotating the clipboard
  • Placing schmatics is cool and all, but I need my gliders to go in arbitrary directions!
  • Nobodies got time to draw everything out!
  • This is implemented! Select a section of the grid using right click, and then rotate it by pressing the 'r'
• Native Application
  • I got an initial implementation of the app working using SDL and Pathfinder, but I stopped supporting it so I could spend more time on features.
  • That said, most of the code is written with native support in mind. Porting wouldn't require reimplementing everything.