Game Of Life

A fast, clean implementation of Conway’s Game of Life built in Roblox Luau.
It renders the grid using EditableImage:WritePixelsBuffer with a single RGBA buffer, supports mouse painting, and runs at a configurable tick rate.

Features

• ⚡ High-performance rendering using EditableImage + buffer (RGBA pixels)
• 🧠 Precomputed neighbor table (8 neighbors per cell) for fast stepping
• 🎨 Click-and-drag painting (LMB) to toggle cells
• ⏯️ Play/Pause, ⏭️ Step, 🧹 Clear, 🎲 Randomize
• 🧩 Modular structure: Config, LifeGrid, ImageRenderer, InputController
• 🔧 --!strict and --!optimize 2 used throughout

Controls

• LMB: Paint cells (click sets a paint mode, drag continues painting)
• Space: Play / Pause
• Enter: Step (only when paused)
• C: Clear
• R: Randomize

How it works (quick overview)

• LifeGrid

  • Stores alive + next_alive boolean arrays
  • Builds a flat neighbor index array (neighbors) once at startup
  • Step() counts live neighbors and applies Conway’s rules
  • Returns a list of changed cell indices for minimal updates

• ImageRenderer

  • Creates UI (ScreenGui, buttons, status label)
  • Creates an EditableImage sized to the grid (W×H)
  • Maintains a single RGBA pixel buffer (GRID_WIDTH * GRID_HEIGHT * 4)
  • Updates pixels and flushes via WritePixelsBuffer

• InputController

  • Converts screen mouse position → grid index based on the ImageLabel bounds

Project Structure

Suggested layout inside your Roblox place (or Rojo project):

GameOfLife/
Client/
Main.client.lua
Modules/
Config.lua
LifeGrid.lua
ImageRenderer.lua
InputController.lua

If you’re using Rojo, keep the modules together and require them exactly as your setup expects (your code uses require'@self/...').

Configuration

Edit Config.lua:

• GRID_WIDTH, GRID_HEIGHT — grid size
• WRAP_EDGES — wrap neighborsoroidal edges on/off
• TICK_RATE — simulation steps per second when running
• RANDOM_DENSITY — random fill chance
• DISPLAY_SCALE — how large the grid is displayed in UI
• Colors + RGBA values:
  • ALIVE_RGBA
  • DEAD_RGBA

Notes / Performance

• Rendering is done by writing RGBA bytes into a buffer and flushing it to the EditableImage.
• The sim step loops the full grid each tick; most UI work is minimized by only rewriting changed cells (then flushing once).