Game Of Life DOTS challenge

Github: LyJam/Game-Of-Life-DOTS-Challenge (github.com)

Video with explanation: https://youtu.be/LP15URd3Y3w

Strategy:

Every cell is an entity with 2 components:

• a Position
• a boolean value to tell if the cell is alive or dead

Each frame 2 main jobs run to calculate the next state of the cells:

• The first job puts the alive state of the cell in a large NativeArray of bytes where 0x00 represents an alive cell and 0xFF represents a dead cell.
• The second jobs iterates through all cells and calculates the amount of neighbors based on the data from the nativearray.

The grid is then displayed to a texture using the LoadRawTextureData method. The texture only holds an 8 bit Alpha channel and has a white texture behind it, so transparent squares (0x00) will be white and non-transparent (0xFF) will be black. This takes advantage of the fact that the array was already calculated in the first job as mentioned above.

Performance (Intel i9-12900; 32GB RAM; GeForce RTX 4060)

• 4000x4000 grid: 60fps
• 6000x6000 grid: 30fps