The Game of Life, an XNA simulation

The Game of Life is a cellular automation simulation written in XNA. This is a zero player game in which there are a few rules that control how the cells are created, live and die. This was an idea that came from a Flash book that I was reading when the power and Internet were out before the holidays. The implementation is adapted from the SpaceWars sample application. I stripped out the bare scene graph stuff from the sample and used it as the starting point for this application. There are some interesting features in this little app like , buttons, mouse hover, handling mouse clicks, dual input (mouse and 360 controller). You can let the game run on its own or step through one evolution at a time. You can also choose some preset setups on the right side that demonstrate, static, repeating and walking patterns.

Here is some background on The Game of Life.

Note: This requires the XBOX 360 controller to run 

Setup : TheGameOfLifeSetup.exe

Source: TheGameOfLifeSourceCode.zip

I have also included the setup project in the sources which demonstrates the techniques that I spoke about in my last post - Build a setup project for your XNA game.