Game of Hex (also known as Snowfake)

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A Game of Life by John Conway" clone that runs in a hexagonal grid for crystal and snowflake simulations!

Features

Hexagonal game of life simulation

This is a game of life that runs on hexagonal grids to simulate crystal structures, like snowflakes.

• Custom board and grid management
• Cell types with modifiable metadata (age, coordinates, state, etc.)
• Easily expandable and editable ruleset!

These are the rules built in: https://clairelommeblog.wordpress.com/category/apmep-journees-2020/

Translates to:

• If there are 1,3,4,5 or 6 alive adjacent cells, the cell becomes alive on the next step.
• If there are 0 or 2 alive adjacent cells, the cell does not change.

If the candie argument is passed, then the rule is:

• If there are 1,3,4,5 or 6 alive adjacent cells, the cell becomes alive on the next step.
• If there are 0 or 2 alive adjacent cells, the cell dies on the next step.

UI

• Built in options for rendering in command line (Unix and windows)
• Pygame user interface, with age based colouring to make pretty snowflakes!
• Easy to add new rendering methods.

Statistics

• Get interesting data about the simulation such number of cells alive over time and average age of a cell.

GIFS

• Easy to make gifs (Pygame only) that make it easy to share your simulations with your friends.
• Also helps with showcasing larger boards that may be slow to run.

Laser cutting outlines

• One click to export outlines for laser cutting.

Setup

You will need:

• Python 3.7.7 or higher but lower than 3.10.
• All the dependencies in requirements.txt. From the base path of this git, run pip install -r requirements.txt to install them all.

How to use

Navigate to src and run python main.py. It should print some stuff about pygame then ---Game of Hex, starting!---.

There are a couple command line arguements that you can use to change how it runs!

  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -x X                  Width of the grid
  -y Y                  Height of the grid
  -f MAXFPS, --maxfps MAXFPS     Maximum frames per seconds
  -r RADIUS, --radius RADIUS    Radius of the hexes (in pixels)
  -o, --outline     Only display hexagon structure outlines (laser cutting)
  -t THICKNESS, --thickness THICKNESS   Thickness of the outline lines (might be important for laser cutters.)
  --text                Use a text UI
  -l, --lines           Draw hexagon grid outline
  --resolution RESOLUTION RESOLUTION     Resolution of the window to open
  -p, --previous        Use previous settings

The first time you run the program, a settings.json file will be created. The below picture was taken with: {"x": 190, "y": 135, "maxfps": null, "radius": 3, "text": false, "lines": false, "resolution": [1000, 700], "outline": false}. This file is referenced when you use -p.

Pygame UI

If you don't select --text, a Pygame window should open after a couple of seconds.

• The red part represents the "board". Click on it to place or remove cells.
• The purple part houses the buttons to control the simulation!
  • Pause / Resume pauses or resumes the simulation. When you start the program, it is paused. When playing, it runs the simulation as fast as it can.
  • Clear resets the board.
  • Step runs one step of the simulation at a time.
  • Make a gif saves a gif of everything that has happened since the last clear or the start. It gets saved to src/img/gif. They are ready to share!
  • Outline SC takes a screenshot of the outline of the alive cells (same as running -o but just for one frame.) The picture is saved to src/img/outline.
  • Name SC asks for a name in the terminal from which the program was launched, and then saves an image with the name in it. This can be used for education where students can all have their own picture printed out.
  • Stats opens mutliple matplotlib windows with stats on the average age of all cells alive, the number of alive cells and the increase per step
• The green part shows the framerate. When the board is paused this shows how many frames the drawing script can draw in a second and during simulation this is the number of simulation steps that were run in the last second.

Text display

If you use --text, you can't really interact with the simulation in real time. In settings.py, place the coordinates for cells that are to exist at the start in startCells = [] (list of tuples).

The numbers in the cells represent the age of the cell and the colour represents it's state.