Square Dino

Conway’s Game of Life implemented in Java using Swing.

Square Dino is a program that runs Conway’s Game of Life. It was created with a friend of mine in the end of spring 2012 as the last project in our introductory course in programming. The course was completely focused on Java and object oriented programming.

A requirement in for the project was to use Swing, the GUI widget toolkit. This was no problem for us as we both had previous experience with it and decided to go far beyond the requirements.

We added many features including import and exporting to file, changing ruleset, and a backend using QuadTrees.

Features

• Modular interface using Swing Toolbox.
• Importing and exporting of patterns using a common format.
• Change the rules of when cells are born or die.
• Copy and paste selected areas.
• Infinite board.
• Zoom and pan.
• Graph of population.

Instructions

Build and execute with

$ javac -d bin/ -cp src/ src/org/bitbucket/zetro/squaredino/SquareDino.java
$ java -cp bin/ org.bitbucket.zetro.squaredino.SquareDino

You should also be able to import it as a project in Eclipse and run it from there.

Links

• square-dino.zip
• Game of Life in DCPU
• Conway’s Game of Life on Wikipedia