A 3D interpretation of Conway’s Game of Life.
Made with bubbles! 💬
demo.mp4
You can use Go or a container engine to run this project.
Container
Run it:
# Assuming X11 compatible host
docker run --rm -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix:rw -e DISPLAY=$DISPLAY ghcr.io/braheezy/bubblelife:v0.1.0
Go
You need the dependencies that go-gl has. That’s a C compiler, and on Debian flavors, the libgl1-mesa-dev package.
Then:
go install github.com/braheezy/bubblelife@v0.1.0
bubblelife
| Action | Keybinding | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Quit | Esc | Closes the window/application. |
| Toggle UI menu | Tab | Toggles the visibility of the UI menu. |
| Navigate UI (down) | Down Arrow | Moves down through UI options. |
| Navigate UI (up) | Up Arrow | Moves up through UI options. |
| Adjust Pillar width | Left/Right Arrow (when option 0) | Adjusts the pillar size N (min 2). |
| Adjust Pillar height | Left/Right Arrow (when option 1) | Adjusts the pillar size M (min 2). |
| Enter seed | 0-9 (when option 2) | Enters numerical input for the seed. |
| Delete last seed digit | Backspace | Removes the last digit entered for the seed. |
| Confirm seed | Enter | Confirms the seed input. |
| Adjust Generation Speed | Left/Right Arrow (when option 3) | Adjusts the generation speed. |
| Camera movement (forward) | W | Moves the camera forward. |
| Camera movement (backward) | S | Moves the camera backward. |
| Camera movement (left) | A | Moves the camera to the left. |
| Camera movement (right) | D | Moves the camera to the right. |
| Unlock cursor | Left Shift | Unlocks the cursor and allows free cursor movement. |
After completing the LearnOpenGL tutorial series, I wanted my own project to use some of the skills I learned. For graphics concepts, I use:
- a cubemap to create the background from. The cubemap is computed and created at runtime from an HDRi image.
- instanced rendering of points for good performance. Several other attempts before this tried to render spheres with vertices and there was poor FPS when viewing 2000 bubbles
- text rendering! which means opentype font parsing. always tricky
- hand-crafted UI system with input handling
- Blinn-Phong shading. And the entire sphere is “faked” in the fragment shader
The size of the pillar is chosen and the seed value is used to set the initial alive/dead population state. The Game is then set into motion. To extend to 3D, I check more neighbors than the original rules used for 2D. The Game algorithm does wrapped boundary checking, treating the pillar as a torus essentially.
For fun, related neighbors are given the same color. This is done by selecting cells, doing a BFS search to find neighbors, and labelling that group with an ID to enforce a different random color later. This works out quite nice.
I got the HDRi file for the background from here.
The font is freely available online.
https://github.com/braheezy/bubblelife
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