litl Game of Life channel

initially written by David Ignacio [email protected]

the inspiration for this channel was taken from Conway's game of life [0]

features:

• the "world" is currently displayed as 45x80, the sides wrap left<->right and top<->bottom to form a pseudo toroidal type of world.
• the size of the world is configurable from the options available in focus view
• the world is initially populated randomly with >33% coverage
• runs at one generation every 100ms
• color of the cell is determined by life, and how many neighbors are alive. the colors are different saturations of litl blue
• go button restarts the game
• game automatically restarts after 600 generations
• game pauses when off screen

things to do:

• make speed of generation an option
• make initial population coverage an option
• make max generation an option
• improve cycle/dead state detection
• click to "inject" alive cells?
• add a favicon

this was developed using the following:

• adobe flex sdk 4.0.0 (not the open source one) [1]
• litl flash channel sdk [2]
• sun java 1.6 [3]
• ant [4]
• adobe air 2 rc1 (for the simulator) [5]

setting up

• checkout this source (i use ~/checkout/gameoflife-channel)
• copy build.properties.template to build.properties
• modify build.properties to point to sdk paths i copied the adobe flex sdk to /opt/flex-sdk_4.0.0 and the litl flash channel sdk to /opt/litl-sdk

building

• cd to the source (cd ~/checkout/gameoflife-channel)
• run ant (ant)

testing/running swf

• install flash debug plugin (/opt/flex-sdk_4.0.0/runtimes/player)

• install adobe air 2 rc1 [5]

• install the litl simulator (/opt/litl-sdk/simulator)

• run the simulator

• open the built swf in a browser (i'm using firefox and chromium) usually it's in ~/checkout/gameoflife-channel/build/deploy/main.swf

packaging for submission

• cd to the source (cd ~/checkout/gameoflife-channel)
• run ant target (ant build-release-zip) creates ~/checkout/build/deploy.zip for use in the developer site to upload the new version of your channel

urls: [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_Game_of_Life [1] http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Download+Flex+4 [2] http://developer.litl.com/ [3] sun-java6-jre package on ubuntu jaunty and lucid [4] ant package on ubuntu jaunty, ant1.8 on lucid [5] http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air2/