Conway's Game of Life

A scalable .NET 5 implementation of Conway's Game of Life written in C#.

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Using the app

Initialize your grid by using the arrow keys to move the cursor, and hitting space to toggle a cell's living/dead state.

Once the grid is set, hit Enter to begin the simulation. While the simulation is running, you can use the arrow keys to pan around the grid so that you can view cells that are beyond the viewport.

Hit Enter (or Space) at any point to pause the simulation, and Enter (or Space) again to resume it.

Setting the tick rate

By default, the simulation runs at 1 tick per second (tps). This is changeable using the --tick-rate command-line flag. The delay between ticks is 1/rate.

Saving/loading states

At any point during the simulation, you can hit F5 to store the state of the grid to disk. By default this will store it a binary encoded file named grid-CURRENTTIME.dat.

You can load a state by using the --load command-line flag, and specifying the filename to load.

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Creating a custom renderer

Inherit ConwaysGameOfLife.Api.Rendering.GridStateRenderer and implement the Render method.

See below for an example renderer which simply outputs how many cells are alive in the current state:

using System;
using ConwaysGameOfLife.Api;
using ConwaysGameOfLife.Api.Rendering;

public class LivingCellRenderer : GridStateRenderer
{
    /// <inheritdoc />
    public override void Render(in GridState grid)
    {
        Console.WriteLine($"There are {grid.LivingCells.Count} living cells for this state.");
    }
}

Refer to ConwaysGameOfLife.Console.ConsoleGridStateRenderer for further example.

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Creating custom tick rules

Simulation ticks work by a system of diffs. Instead of storing and passing the complete state of a grid, we only need to pass what has changed since the last tick.

To use, inherit ConwaysGameOfLife.Api.GameRules.TickRule and implement the Tick method.

See below for an example tick rule which randomly kills a living cell, regardless of its neighbours:

using ConwaysGameOfLife.Api;
using ConwaysGameOfLife.Api.GameRules;

public class KillRandomCellTickRule : TickRule
{
    private static readonly Random Random = new();

    /// <inheritdoc />
    public override GridStateDiff Tick(in GridState gridState)
    {
        // must copy to array to index-access
        var cells = gridState.LivingCells.ToArray();
        var randomCell = cells[Random.Next(cells.Length)];

        // pass in array of cells (location + state) to create diff
        return new GridStateDiff(new[]
        {
            new Cell(randomCell.Location, CellState.Dead)
        });
    }
}

Refer to ConwaysGameOfLife.Api.GameRules.ClassicTickRule to see how the classic rules are implemented.