Game of Life in bash

31. 10. 2022

Action examples (see –help):

# from zsh prompt:
repeat 100 gameOfLife +++ | tee -a gol.txt

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First grid is randomly populated using random seed (can be extended later to support user input seeds - implemented), runs hardcoded number of generations (can be now user defined), depending on the grid size, will exit prematurly if grid is empty (all are dead) or all are static.

Possible future: gif generation or just bitmap frames storage. Completely unoptimized, may even be wrong (not tested a lot). The static structures are ‘correct’, so I must be close.

playGameOfLifeTxt is a player script for empty line delimited txt files. Asciinema.

Possible rasterizer:

pango-view --background=white --antialias=none --font=mono -qo out.png example.txt

Or just screenshot the active window/terminal (on machines with Xorg)

maim -i "$(xdotool getactivewindow)" woot.png
# actually xdotool should be only run once and store the var

Then from frames to prores

ffmpeg -i 201c730b7599d48c30cf254f3ade83fb-%03d.png -c:v prores -pix_fmt yuv422p -an -r 12 gol40.mov

ffmpeg -f image2 -pattern_type glob -i "*.png" -c:v prores -pix_fmt yuv422p -an -r 12 gol160.mov

And prores to gif (there should be a way to force 2 colors only?)

ffmpeg -i gol40.mov -vf palettegen=16 pal.png 
ffmpeg -i gol40.mov -i pal.png -filter_complex \
"fps=12,paletteuse=dither=none" gol40.gif

rasterizeGameOfLifeTxt is a png generator script.

Cool links:
https://oimo.io/works/life/ (remember to zoom in, zoom out)

bash mine