/Game-of-Life-OpenGL

Primary LanguageC++

The Game of Life in OpenGL using GLSL shaders

Simulates John Conway's "The Game of Life" in an OpenGL fragment shader (GLSL).

How it works

  • Application reads an image with the initial pattern
  • Two render passes
  • First pass renders the new state of the simulation into a framebuffer, using the previous framebuffer output as input
    • Fragment shader samples points around current pixel and writes new state to attached color buffer
  • Then the two framebuffers are swapped
  • Second pass just renders the output texture as fullscreen quad on screen buffer

Building on Linux

Install GCC or Clang, along with cmake and make. On most Linux distibutions this is a straightforward and well documented task.

mkdir Build && cd Build
cmake ..
make

Building on Windows

This can be build using Visual Studio, but this will show how you can setup the MinGW GCC compiler on windows to build cross platform C++ applications.

Setup MinGW/x64 on Windows

Download and install MSYS2: http://www.msys2.org/

Here is a guide which covers most of this: https://www.devdungeon.com/content/install-gcc-compiler-windows-msys2-cc

Now install required dependencies:

pacman -Syu
pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-toolchain
pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-make
pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-cmake
pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-glfw
pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-glew
pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-glm
pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-libpng
pacman -Ss glfw

Add to PATH: C:\msys64\mingw64\bin

Then build the source:

mkdir Build && cd Build
cmake -G "MinGW Makefiles" ..
mingw32-make