Conway's Game Of Life is a cool mathematical game that is immensely enhanced by the ability to quickly simulate a game state using a computer. This explains its popularity as a code project, and my interest in tossing my hat in the ring when writing my own implementation using the sdl2 bindings in rust, to learn the language.
I've already implemented this a while ago using pancurses. While i do prefer the terminal aesthetic, this does have a lot more features: i'm keeping the repo open, but if i do eventually work on this project again, it's gonna be here.
Colors can be customized at the top of grid.rs, defined as constants.
Size, scale, and fullscreen-itude are defined at the top of main.rs.
You can additionally change the "probability" of the cells being alive at the start of the game by changing P at the top of grid.rs. For reference, 1.0 means no alive cell, and 0.0 means no dead cell.
Default controls are:
- left mouse button: toggle cell
- enter: toggle start/pause
- esc: quit
- plus/minus: speed up/slow down game
- R [when paused/setup]: reload grid to random state
- Q [when paused/setup]: reload grid to empty state, and to setup phase
- E [when paused/setup]: export current state to file "export.txt"
- M [when paused]: open import modal
- enter [when importing]: choose current file
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i thought i had fixed the edge issue by having it loop around: apparently not, but the issue is fixed and i don't know exactly what it does but i'll leave it at that for now.
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allow reading states from an input file, maybe a list of binary strings?
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allow choosing which file to import
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allow more flexible importing: right now, it only accepts import if the exact conditions are met, and panics otherwise: need to find a way to allow funky imports or fail without breaking. (could maybe use a "setup" line as first line of text file to import specifying width/height/scale expected)
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allow exporting current state to file in the same format as reader