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John Conway's Game of Life

Release:	5.1
Date:	20 April 2003
O/S:	All Windows 9x and NT versions (inc. XP, Vista & Windows 7)

• Overview
• Download
• Install Info
• Change Log
• License

Change Log

• Converted to 32 bit application.
• Modified user interface to give more of a Windows 95 look and feel.

• Major revision of program.
• The main new feature is the addition of user defined rules which govern births and deaths of life-forms. The original Game of Life rule is provided as a default.
• A new engine was introduced to manage the program's colour schemes - and a similar one manages the list of rules.
• Some changes were made to the interface:
  • Some menu names were slighty altered and a new option to edit rules was introduced.
  • Status bar was divided into two sections to display information about colour scheme and current rule. Double clicking the appropriate section displays either the rule or colour scheme dialogs.
  • Game grid now appears raised rather than lowered.
  • Colour schemes dialog box totally redseigned with a thumbnail of each colour scheme now appearing in the drop down list of schemes. Long scheme names now word-wrap.
  • All dialog boxes are constrained to remain wholly on screen.
• A new format for naming colour schemes in ini file was adopted, based on that used for rules.
• The ini file now has new format.
• Changed file format for saved games - incompatible with earlier versions.
• Added version information to the program.

• Removed ini file handling from Setup unit to separate unit. The Setup unit was now dedicated to handling the colour scheme dialog box and was therefore renamed to ColSchm.

• Made status bar's pop-up menu display a different help topic depending on which part of bar is right-clicked. Right-clicking on the Colour Schemes area causes selection of help topic on pop-up menu to display information about colour schemes while right-clicking anywhere else on the status bar leads to a pop-up menu with help about the status bar.
• Double clicking on colour schemes area of status bar panel now causes Colour Schemes dialog box to be displayed.

• Added a help item to Status Bar and Command Bar popup menus and made display relevant help topic.

• Made program able to show or hide status bar.
• Made status bar visibility persistent by writing state to ini file.
• Gave status bar a pop-up menu with menu item to hide the bar.

• Made command bar customisable and added new menu item and command bar pop-up menu to access this feature.
• Enabled command bar to be hidden by means of a pop-up menu.

• Gave each life-form an "age" which is displayed on main window.
• Fixed a cell selection bug.

• Major program update.
• Added menu bar.
• WinHelp based help system provided.
• Speed buttons now duplicate some menu commands and some additional commands were added.
• About box now displayed from menu.
• Rationalised design and placing of buttons.
• Added pop-up menu for game grid.
• Gave option to have "Command Bar" (containing speed buttons) hidden or displayed.
• Added a status bar.

• System "makeover" - udpated look of system to be consistent as follows:
  • heavy font replaced by a light font throughout
  • button positioning on dialog boxes made consistent
  • button captions & shortcuts made consistent
  • system menus now used on all dialog boxes
  • position of dialog boxes made relative to parent form
• Removed About box form and replaced by PJ About component.
• Altered code of Help unit and some resource strings to accommodate changes.

• Re-wrote grid display mechanism, using hourglass for lengthy redraws. Grid is now only redrawn on closing setup dialog if colour scheme changed.

• Extensively revised main form to allow user to drag out a selection of cells and to either fill with life-forms or to kill all life-forms in selection. Added two new buttons, "Create cell/all" and "Kill cell/all" (captions depend on whether single cell or multiple selection is enabled).
• Updated the help text to describe changes.

• Added new Save Scheme dialog box which gets name of a scheme to be saved from user when Set-up dialog box needs to save a scheme. This new dialog box replaces previous InputQuery call. The new dialog allows user to select from exiting scheme names as well as entering a new name.

• Made major update to set-up dialog box.
• Fixed memory leak bug in main unit where snapshot and start-of-game instances were not freed on termination.
• Fixed bug in calculation unit - inherited constructor was not called in class constructor.

• Significant upgrade - added several new facilities
• Added "Snapshot" facility to record state of play in any one generation.
• Added "Replay" facility to replay the game from the start, or from any snapshot.
• Games can now be saved in any of the following states: start of game (after life forms placed and before first generation), latest snapshot (if any) and currently displayed generation.
• Games can also be loaded from disk. The game is loaded as if the life-forms on the saved game had just been placed by the user on a newly cleared grid - ie in generation zero.
• A game can be reset.
• Reorganised main window to have a "command bar" across top of window containing buttons for Load, Save, Clear, Setup, Help and Exit.
• The game commands Next Generation, Replay and Snapshot are placed in the body of the window.
• Added an about box to the program, accessed via the help dialog box.
• Added new exception class to TGameOfLife (to trap errors) and added three new dialog box units.
• Placed some version and copyright information in a new resource file, along with certain bitmaps and the error messages used by the TGameOfLife class.

• Modified the set-up dialog code so that selecting the same colour scheme again will re-load it and display will revert to its oiginal colours.
• Changed Set up dialog box so that all buttons have glyphs and re-arranged layout accordingly.
• Also added description of all facilities of the Setup dialog to the help dialog.
• Improved appearance of main window.

• Re-organised game engine into a class TGameOfLife. This involved a total restructuing of the Calc unit and a total rewrite of some of the code.
• Main form code was altered to accommodate changes to the game engine.

• Added facility to save and load program colour settings as named colour schemes in the Life.ini file stored in the same directory as the program.

• Added dialog box with which to customise the game grid colour scheme.

• Altered help dialog box to be larger and more informative.
• Removed system menu and repositioned closure button.

• Altered program's "game-board" display mechanism to speed it up and improve appearance.
• Modified form arrangment to balance new "game-board" display size.
• Made all buttons display glyphs.

• Altered program to enable it to be minimised.
• Ensured all buttons have a keyboard shortcut.
• Changed name and glyph of help screen cancel button.
• Added application title that is displayed when application is minimised.
• Added customs icon.

• Total re-write as a Windows 3.1 program.
• Uses core calculation code from v1.0.

• Original DOS program - compiled with Turbo Pascal.