Conway's Game of Life (C++)

Conway's Game of Life implemented in C++. Program uses SFML for rendering the simulation.

Build

From the project root run

make

NOTE - This program currently depends on OpenMP, so your compiler needs to support it. See a list of supported compilers. Additionally, you will also need SFML installed on the system to compile - chances are, it should be trivial if you're on Linux.

Usage

To run the main program:

bin/conway [options]

Available options are:

-w / --width <width> The width of the grid
-h / --height <height> The height of the grid
-p / --probability <probability> The probability of each cell being alive at the start of the simulation
-g / --generations <generations> The number of generations the simulation will run for
-i / --help Displays help text

Then possibly follow the command line prompts. There will be none if all arguments are supplied in the initial command (otherwise, you will be asked to enter size, probability of cell being alive & generations, as needed).

The simulation can be stopped before it's completed by terminating the program, closing the window, or pressing the Escape key.

Implementation Notes

The implementation is heavily based on one of Michael Abrash's versions of the simulation - see Listing 17.5 L17-5.CPP. However, amongst other things, rather than finding each cell's neighbours on each iteration, I just store them on each cell (since there is not really a space constraint as there is for the linked version).

Each cell therefore contains a list of its neighbours, as well as its state - which is stored as a byte. The byte is split up as follows:

XXXN NNNS

X are unused bits; N are bits used for storing the number of the cell's live neighbours; S is the bit responsible for storing the cell's state (alive / dead).

General Notes

This implementation has currently only been tested on Linux (Ubuntu 18.04.1).
There is a Visual Studio solution Windows currently in a separate branch.

Memory Leak Notes