Game of Life

Game of life written ES2015 and Redux

Demo

http://hurtak.github.io/game-of-life/

Features

Nice interface

Plenty of patterns to play with

Stats (hidden feature, activate it by clicking on the 'Game of Life' heading)

Technology overview

• No frameworks used, programmed in vanilla ES2015 (compiled to ES5 with Babel)
• Redux for state management
• BEM for styles management with LESS as CSS preprocessor
• Tested with AVA
• Jsdom for automatic downloading of patterns from conwaylife.com/wiki

Development & Compilation

Prerequisites

• Node.js is required
• install dependencies with npm install

Development mode

• npm run dev compile app in development mode and start web server with live reload

Production mode

• npm run dist compile app in production mode and start web server

Benchmark

• tests how long it takes to recalculate world state
• located in ./app/scripts/benchmark/ directory
• easiest way to run it is to uncomment benchmark import in ./app/scripts/app.js, start the app and look into browser console
• you can tune settings (number of iterations, tested world size) in ./app/scripts/benchmark/benchmark.js

Scripts for downloading game of life patterns

• located in ./scripts/download-patterns-from-wiki.js
• run with node node ./scripts/download-patterns-from-wiki.js
• downloads patterns into ./scripts/data/ directory

TODO / Potential improvements

• Add help screen to explain what is going on
• improve performance
• add tooltip to cursor patterns
• selected cursor highlight in cursors menu
• close button inside cursors menu?
• save state to localstorage?
• save world to url?
• draw already visited cells with different color (fade out this color after some time)
• use setTimeout based timer instead of setInterval?
• use requestAnimationFrame?
• world recalculation in service worker?