open source | Learn C Games Programming Blog

A free eBook about the Game of Life

Posted on February 17, 2023February 16, 2023 by David

Remember the cellular automation Life? I covered it in previous blog entries John Conway’s Game of Life and also Portable Life in C. Well, Associate Professor Nathaniel Johnston (in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, Canada) and Dave Greene wrote a book/eBook about Life. It’s N. Johnston and D. Greene. Conway’s Game of Life: Mathematics and Construction.

The 474 page eBook is free on this page or you can buy the coloured hardback book. On Amazon that’s a modest £59.99! The PDF is 93 MB in size.

Ever since Life was publicized in Scientific American in the 1970s, it’s held a fascination for many including myself. I wrote a program (in Basic) 45 years ago to run it, but it was quite slow. One of the fastest I ever saw was written in 6502 assembly language running on an Acorn Atom. A very comprehensive and fast open source Life is Golly, written in C++ and is scriptable in Python or Lua.

But back to the book. If you are a real life afficionado and know the difference between a Glider and an Oscillator then this book/eBook is definitely for you. It’s a detailed look at Life from an academic point of view.

Warzone-2100 C++ cross platform open source

Posted on March 16, 2021March 14, 2021 by David

There are some amazing open source games available and Warzone 2100 is definitely one of them. It was originally developed by Pumpkin Studios and published by Eidos Interactive. It was originally released in 1999 on PC and PlayStation.

In late 2004 the source code and most of the data was released and a few years later the rest of it. It is now also available for Windows 7-10, macOS, FreeBSD, AmigaOS, AROS, MorphOS, Linux, NetBSD and OpenBSD. Since then the Warzone 2100 Project has been worked on.

According to the GitHub page “Command the forces of The Project in a battle to rebuild the world after mankind has been nearly destroyed by nuclear missiles. “. You can play it in single-player mode or against other players on a LAN or on the internet.

To get a feel for the game you can view the online guide.

Once you’ve played it, you could consider contributing to the project. It’s an open project and the issue tracker currently shows 213 open issues.