sadAquarium

Here's an older experiment I tried for an aquarium using some of Craig Reynolds rules for flocking.

I started to build a rules engine with the hope of playing with different combinations of behavior, but didn't get further than what you see. Get started by adding a shoal - just click the add button. The fish will swim around the tank avoiding each other and the tank walls, but will also try to keep together.

The display is a scaled 3D scene of a 1m cube tank;it's interactive in that you can move your view around the wireframe "tank" by moving the mouse while holding down the left button. And you can zoom in and out by holding down the right mouse button and moving the mouse. Other than that, the control box is pretty obvious - except the parameters actually used are distributed around the values you specify according to the variation factor. This is mostly so that the fish appear with a range of sizes. I'll post the code soon.

It's not very efficient, so expect to see your cpu usage go way up, especially if there are large shoals. But with a high frame rate and the right combination of values you can pursuade yourself that the fish are actually swimming around!