This project is based on John Conway's Game of Life and utilizes Life 1.06 file format for input. It is in 64-bit signed integer space. It was built in Xcode (Version 12.3) using Swift version 5.3.2. It has been ported to C#.
This Summer durning my Lambda School experience we had a "build week" in which the assignment was to build Game of Life as an iOS app.
This assignment differs in some fundamental ways.
- Command line tool instead of a GUI
- 64-bit signed integer space: The iOS app kept the entire grid in memory. The smaller grid size made this possible.
While I started with the basic game logic from iOS; it had to be heavily adapted since I switched from a fixed grid to a sparse grid stored in a dictionary. This results in a much smaller memory footprint; especially with smaller game files.
- Load the file.
- The game board only contains live cells.
- Process each live cell in the game board and note if the cell is dying this iteration.
- In the process of checking the game board, note adjoining cells.
- Check each of the adjoining cells to determine whether the cell should be alive (added to the game board) after this iteration.
- Remove the dead cells from the game board.
- From the list of adjoining cells, add any new cells to the game board.
- Got to step 3 and repeat number of generations specified by the user.
- Save final game board to file with
-result.txtappended to input filename.
Start with main.swift. The bulk of the program logic is in GameOfLife.swift with a supporting object in Cell.swift. ConsoleIO.swift supports the command line program (file input/output and parsing the command line) and should be reviewed last.