Conway's Game of Life

This project implements Conway's Game of Life as a .NET 6 solution with C# 10. This solution includes both a console and a GUI app.

How to run the GUI app

The graphical version of the application is implemented using Avalonia UI. It has been tested to work at least on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) and Windows 10 21H1.

To run the GUI app, you will first need .NET 6 installed. Once this is set up, navigate into the repository root and run the following command:

dotnet run --project src/Xyaneon.Games.ConwaysGameOfLife.Avalonia/Xyaneon.Games.ConwaysGameOfLife.Avalonia.csproj

The app can currently load Game of Life files in the Plaintext file format (.cells extension). You can either supply your own, or try one of the included examples in the samples/ directory.

How to run the console app

Running the project with dotnet

One of the main projects in this solution is a console app.

To run the console app, you will first need .NET 6 installed. Once this is set up, navigate into the repository root and run the following command:

dotnet run --project src/Xyaneon.Games.ConwaysGameOfLife.CLI/Xyaneon.Games.ConwaysGameOfLife.CLI.csproj --file <file_name_here>

The app can currently load Game of Life files in the Plaintext file format (.cells extension). You can either supply your own, or try one of the included examples in the samples/ directory. For example, here's the same command with the samples/blinker.cells path provided:

dotnet run --project src/Xyaneon.Games.ConwaysGameOfLife.CLI/Xyaneon.Games.ConwaysGameOfLife.CLI.csproj --file samples/blinker.cells

The console app is interactive. It will print the updated state into the terminal each time you press any key, until you press Q to quit.

Creating a standalone executable

The above instructions will give you a framework-dependent executable you can quickly run if dotnet is installed locally. It is also possible to create a standalone command line executable that should not need .NET to be installed to run.

To do this, run the following command (replace linux-x64 with your target platform if needed):

dotnet publish -c Release -r linux-x64 --self-contained true

This will create an executable file named Xyaneon.Games.ConwaysGameOfLife.CLI in the src/Xyaneon.Games.ConwaysGameOfLife.CLI/bin/Release/net6.0/linux-x64/publish directory.

You can then place this executable wherever you like, and run it from within the same directory with a command like the following:

./Xyaneon.Games.ConwaysGameOfLife.CLI --file <your pattern file path>

Background

This project is my entry into a sort of coding competition among friends. We were each tasked with creating our own implementation of Conway's Game of Life, with any technology or features of our choosing. Our deadline was June 30, 2022.

Other entries I could link to are listed below:

• https://github.com/jquesada2/game-of-life
• https://github.com/kjarosz/HaskellGameOfLife

License

This project is free and open-source software (FOSS) released under an MIT license. See LICENSE.txt for details.