Java Tick 3*

In this exercise you will write a program to produce animated GIFs showing successive generations of a world in Conway's Game of Life. Your first task is to complete the implementation of OutputAnimatedGif displayed at the end of this exercise by providing an implementation for the body of the makeFrame method. The method must draw the current state of the world into a BufferedImage. You can create a new BufferedImage as follows:

BufferedImage image = new BufferedImage(w, h, BufferedImage.TYPE_INT_RGB);

where w and h are int variables containing the desired width and height of image. To draw onto image you need to create a graphics context. When you have finished using the graphics context, you must call the dispose method to clean up system resources. Here is an example usage pattern:

Graphics g = image.getGraphics(); //create a new graphics context
 // call methods on "g" here to draw onto the image
g.dispose(); // free up resources used by the graphics context

The drawing routines for the graphics context are available in the Java library documentation. You may find the methods setColor, fillRect and drawLine helpful. Once you have written your implementation of makeFrame you can use OutputAnimatedGif to produce an animated GIF file as follows:

Create an instance of OutputAnimatedGif by calling the constructor and supplying the filename of the animated GIF as a Java String.
Call the addFrame method to add a specific generation of the world to the animated GIF; you need to call addFrame each time you wish to add a new generation.
Call the close method to write the animation to the file.

Your next task is to write a Java class called AnimatedLife which accepts a format string, an integer describing the number of generations to include, and a filename for the output. For example,

crsid@machine~> java uk.ac.cam.your-crsid.tick3star.AnimatedLife \
 "Glider:Richard Guy (1970):20:20:1:1:010 001 111" 10 output.gif

should draw the first 10 generations of a glider to the file named output.gif. You may find it helpful to use PatternLife.java as the basis for writing AnimatedLife. Please include a sample output from your program in a file called competition.gif, and the actual pattern you gave your program on the command line to generate your competition GIF entry, saved in a plain text file competition.txt; the best submission will appear on the course website.

Construct a jar file named crsid-tick3star.jar containing your code and competition entry and email it as an attachment to ticks1a-java@cl.cam.ac.uk. Your jar file should contain:

META-INF/
META-INF/MANIFEST.MF
uk/ac/cam/your-crsid/tick3star/competition.gif
uk/ac/cam/your-crsid/tick3star/competition.txt
uk/ac/cam/your-crsid/tick3star/AnimatedLife.java
uk/ac/cam/your-crsid/tick3star/AnimatedLife.class
uk/ac/cam/your-crsid/tick3star/Pattern.java
uk/ac/cam/your-crsid/tick3star/Pattern.class
uk/ac/cam/your-crsid/tick3star/OutputAnimatedGif.java
uk/ac/cam/your-crsid/tick3star/OutputAnimatedGif.class

You should set the entry point of the jar file so that the following works:

crsid@machine:~> java -jar crsid-tick3star.jar \
"Glider:Richard Guy (1970):20:20:1:1:010 001 111" 10 output.gif

package uk.ac.cam.your-crsid.tick3star;

// Tell the compiler where to find the additional classes used in this file
import java.awt.*;
import java.awt.image.*;
import java.io.*;
import javax.imageio.*;
import javax.imageio.stream.*;
import javax.imageio.metadata.*;

public class OutputAnimatedGif {

 private FileImageOutputStream output;
 private ImageWriter writer;

 public OutputAnimatedGif(String file) throws IOException {
  this.output = new FileImageOutputStream(new File(file)); 
  this.writer = ImageIO.getImageWritersByMIMEType("image/gif").next();
  this.writer.setOutput(output);
  this.writer.prepareWriteSequence(null);
 }

 private BufferedImage makeFrame(boolean[][] world) {
  //TODO: complete this method
 }
	
 public void addFrame(boolean[][] world) throws IOException {
  BufferedImage image = makeFrame(world);
  try {
   IIOMetadataNode node = new IIOMetadataNode("javax_imageio_gif_image_1.0");
   IIOMetadataNode extension = new IIOMetadataNode("GraphicControlExtension");
   extension.setAttribute("disposalMethod", "none");
   extension.setAttribute("userInputFlag", "FALSE");
   extension.setAttribute("transparentColorFlag", "FALSE");
   extension.setAttribute("delayTime", "1");
   extension.setAttribute("transparentColorIndex", "255");
   node.appendChild(extension);
   IIOMetadataNode appExtensions = new IIOMetadataNode("ApplicationExtensions");
   IIOMetadataNode appExtension = new IIOMetadataNode("ApplicationExtension");
   appExtension.setAttribute("applicationID", "NETSCAPE");
   appExtension.setAttribute("authenticationCode", "2.0");
   byte[] b = "\u0021\u00ff\u000bNETSCAPE2.0\u0003\u0001\u0000\u0000\u0000".getBytes();
   appExtension.setUserObject(b);
   appExtensions.appendChild(appExtension);
   node.appendChild(appExtensions);

   IIOMetadata metadata;
   metadata = writer.getDefaultImageMetadata(new ImageTypeSpecifier(image), null);
   metadata.mergeTree("javax_imageio_gif_image_1.0", node);

   IIOImage t = new IIOImage(image, null, metadata);
   writer.writeToSequence(t, null);
  }
  catch (IIOInvalidTreeException e) {
   throw new IOException(e);
  }
 }

 public void close() throws IOException {
  writer.endWriteSequence();
 }
}