Game of Life animation generator written in C, as a teaching resource.
The project uses CMake, so you will have to have it installed, as well as some C compiler (e.g. gcc, clang or msvc).
If you use a C/C++ IDE, you might be able to import the directory as a CMake project, which should allow you to handle building and running the project through the tools provided by the IDE.
If you would rather do it through command line, you'll need to:
-
Create a build folder, where the generated files and binaries will be stored:
mkdir -p build/debug -
Move to the build folder and initialize the CMake target:
cd build/debug cmake ../.. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug cd - -
Now you can build the project using:
cmake --build build/debug
Steps 1 and 2 need to be done once for every target. The example above will
create a debug target, which will produce an unoptimized binary with debug
symbols, making it easy to run it in a debugger. If you would like to produce
a release target (optimized, with debug symbols stripped), do the same,
but replace debug/Debug with release/Release.
Step 3 needs to be repeated every time you make changes to the code.
Before running the program you will have to create a directory for the output
frames. At this point this directory name is hard coded into the program, so it
needs to be called out, and it needs to be located in your working directory.
mkdir out
After that you can run the program from the build directory, providing the path to the gol file you want to generate your animation from:
build/debug/gol max.gol
After that the frames of the animation will be places in the out folder.
The program generates individual frames, which now have to be merged into an
animation. If you would like to create a GIF, you can use convert, which
requires you to have imagemagick installed:
convert out/* out.gif
For larger animations GIF might not be the right format, so you can instead generate an MP4 file with ffmpeg:
ffmpeg -i out/%03d.pbm -f mp4 -pix_fmt yuv420p -c:v libx264 out.mp4