README.md

########################################################################## Game of Life

© Lorenzo Martinico, Piotr Jander 2014 ##########################################################################

010    The `Game of Life' program,
001    well,
111    plays the game of life.

Overview

1. Installation.
2. Usage.
3. Features.

#1 Installation

Before attempting to compile the program, make sure that the packages matrix' and gloss' are installed.

The package has a structure:

\GameOfLife
	\bin-*
		...
	\patterns
		...
	\src
		Grid.hs
		Main.hs

Suppose you want to compile the program for Windows. Then

1. Create a folder "bin-win32" in "GameOfLife".
2. Go to "src".
3. Run

ghc -o ../bin-win32/Life -outputdir ../bin-win32 Main.hs

This will create the output files in "GameOfLife/bin-win32". They will include an executable file "Life".

#2 Usage

To run the program, go to "bin-*", where * is your platform. Then run, for example

Life 10 vacuum-cleaner

This command will open a window in which the system's evolution will be animated. The program will get the pattern from "GameOfLife/patterns/vacuum-cleaner.rle" and animate it at the speed of 10 frames per second. You can drag the canvas and zoom in/out with the mouse to adjust the view.

You can also type

Life patterns

to see a list of supplied patterns.

#3 Features

The program can:

• read pattern data from RLE files.
• animate the evolution of a big system in real time.
• chaotically colours the grid; each time the program is run, it uses a random palette of colors from the file `palettes'.

It also has, however, some limitations:

• it can't animate very big patterns at a very high fps rate.
• it can only animate systems which shrink or whose size stays about the same; this is because the grid is represented as a matrix of fixed size.