CursedLife

An implementation of Conway's Game of Life using NodeJS and NCurses Blessed.

"But Paul, why build yet another Game of Life simulator for NodeJS?" Haha! The answer is simple, my friends:

• I wanted to.
• Mine is different.
• The others I found were slightly confusing, and didn't allow custom rulesets.

Since version 2.0, this project uses the blessed library in place of node-ncurses. The node-ncurses project wasn't being actively supported, and didn't work on newer versions of Node (eg. 0.12) for a long time. Blessed is slightly less performant, but has much better compatability than the node-curses project ever had. Unfortunately there is already a Game of Life simulator written in blessed, so I lose a little bit of uniqueness. However, I think that I've done enough differently in this project that it's still worthwhile even after the switch.

Install

$ npm install -g cursedlife

Usage

Simply run the program from command line:

$ cursedlife

Commands

Once it's running, the program can accept several commands to control the simulation:

• start : Will unpause the simulation
• stop : Will pause the simulation
• next : Will advance the simulation by one generation
• clear : Will clear the entire screen, turning all cells off.
• load : Will allow you to load a JSON configuration file.
• set : Will allow you to set the speed, survivalrate, etc.

Simply start typing; the text will appear in the input panel along the bottom of the window. Hit 'ENTER' to submit your command.

Cursor

Use the arrow keys to move the cursor in the output panel. Hitting 'ENTER' will toggle the currently selected cell.

Loading Files

load <filename>; eg. load patterns/gospergun.json

The load command looks for files in the directory that the program was executed from. For example, if you cd to a directory full of JSON files before running $ cursedlife, all of those files will be accessible to the program without having to type the full path.

The files should be JSON, and should follow the this template:

{
    "posChar": "@",
    "negChar": " ",
    "birthrate": 3,
    "surviverate: 23,
    "state": [
        [false, false, false, false],
        [false, false, true,  true ],
        [false, false, true,  true ]
    ]
}

Note that all of the values are optional; you can have a JSON file that specifies only state, birthrate and surviverate, or any other combinations.

Release History

v2.0.0

Re-wrote the UI fully to use blessed in place of node-ncurses.

v1.0.0

Implemented a clear command. Also implemented the ability to move a cursor using the arrow keys, and toggle a specific cell using the ENTER key.

Bumped the major version number; these are all of the originally planned features, so I'm calling it the 1.0 release!

v0.0.4

The load command is now able to read other configuration options. For example, you can specify birthrate, surviverate and negative/positive characters in the JSON.

v0.0.3

Partially implemented the load command.

Loading JSON files from a patterns directory works. Currently, only simulation state is read from the JSON. The ability to read other configuration data from the JSON is planned.

Example:

• load patterns/gospergun.json

v0.0.2

Implemented the set command for all variables that can be user defined.

Surviverate and birthrate are sets of integers from 0-8. A surviverate of 23 indicates that a cell will survive if it has either 2 or 3 active neighbours. Interval is the time, in ms, between each generation. Examples:

• set surviverate 246
• set birthrate 35
• set generation 0
• set interval 1000
• set posChar @
• set negChar .

v0.0.1

First working release. Many things are not implemented, but the following should work:

• start
• stop
• next

License

Copyright (c) 2014 Paul McMonagle. Licensed under the MIT license.