tgol

Several cell-configurations compete in a Tournament inspired by Conway's Game of Life

Dear Visitor

If you made it to this point, you are probably interested in how it all works and maybe even how you can hack it. Let me apologize for the complete lack of documentation. Here are some basics:

Install and start

Just clone the repository. Run npm install to pull dependencies and compile coffeescript code. Create a directory where the backend service should persiste its tournament data. Do something like export TGOL_HOME=/path/to/that/directory. Then run npm start to start the service. ATM the first request is very slow because all the client code is minified on-the-fly.

Configuration

At the root of the codebase, there is a file settings.yaml, which contains defaults for all settings. To override some of them, put a file settings.yaml in your CGOL_HOME directory. The content of both files is merged. Within the CGOL_HOME directory, there is a subdirectory for each tournament. ATM there will only be froscon2016 -- the name is currently hard-coded in the client code -- we plan to make this configurable eventually. In the tournament dir, there should be a file meta.yaml which contains the PIN for that tournament. A client needs to provide this PIN when uploading match results.

Not So Frequently Asked Questions

So, why is it called 'tgol'? The 'gol' part is obvious. The 't' is for 'tarent', the company we work for. The was started, because we needed an eye-catcher for tarent's booth at the FrOSCon 2016. All coding was done during working hours so we felt it is fair to call the whole thing "tarent's Game of Life".

But my first association was actually this: