Game of Life using OpenCL

The well known game of Conway as a homework assignment for the GPGPU course at Budapest University of Technology and Economics, 2016.

Dependencies and Compilation

The game was developed and run on Arch Linux, with CMake, OpenGL and OpenCL preinstalled.

pacman -S ocl-icd opencl-headers opencl-nvidia libtinfo-5

For Intel processors the intel-opencl-runtime from AUR is also required.

To compile and run the program, install CMake and navigate to the root directory:

pacman -S cmake
cd gpgpu_gameoflife
mkdir bin
cd bin
cmake ..
./gpgpu_gameoflife

Usage

After starting the application, a white playfield is present. At this point the game reacts to the following user input:

• W A S D keys move the playfield in four directions.
• Q and E keys zoom in and out, while 0 resets zoom to 1.
• Drag-n-drop movements with the mouse also move the field.
• Any other key input makes the field step one.

Legend

• Newborn cells are completely white.
• As cells age, they become darker.
• Dying cells are bright red.
• Long dead cells fade away.