== What is Frock? Frock is a flock simulator. Was first a port, then a simulation, maybe later a game. But the immediate goals are for it to support a large number >100 of flying boids == Installing You need to install Lua5.1 and the Love 0.5.0 2D Game Framework, along with any dependencies that package needs. http://love2d.org/download == Running Clone the repo from the git repository. git clone git://github.com/iamwilhelm/frock.git Then inside of the frock root directory run: love . Don't forget the period! == Author Wilhelm Chung blog: http://webjazz.blogspot.com github: http://github.com/iamwilhelm == Swarming Chickens (boids) Introduction Blog post: http://webjazz.blogspot.com/2009/02/introducing-frock-flocking-chicken.html You'll see chickens flocking around eating the shrubbery. It demonstrates the flocking algorithm, and that each chicken follows only three rules 1. Out of your neighbors, head towards what you perceive to be the center of the flock 2. Avoid colliding with your neighbors. The closer you are, the more you'll want to move away 3. Of all your neighbors, head in the same direction they're going. Add the three vector forces up for these three motivations, and you have flocking behavior. There are two additional forces in the simulation to make it more interesting to watch. 1. Move towards the center of the screen 2. Move towards plants that you perceive to be around you. Notice that the flocks split and regroup and weave around on the screen, and there is no global coordination. Each chicken can only see what's around it, but you get this emergent property of flocking. == History and credits I've always loved swarms and boids ever since I learned about them. I've made my own flocking boids in Netlogo, but they were never fast enough. The demo for Lua's particle system impressed me, with its speed. And Love seemed easy enough to get started with. I wanted to see if I can create a simulation for boids. So after hacking away at about 5 or 6 hours total, I had the first version working. This was originally a port of Wally Glutton's (http://stungeye.com) Hungry Boids app from Ruby Shoes into Lua Love http://the-shoebox.org/apps/45 Boids were first introduced by Craig Reynolds: http://www.red3d.com/cwr/boids/ Boid Algorithm Tutorial: http://www.vergenet.net/~conrad/boids/pseudocode.html Farm animals were ripped off of Harvest Moon by N-finity http://tsgk.captainn.net/index.php?p=userinfo&t=1 Succulent Plants by James Gately http://www.istockphoto.com/user_view.php?id=2715153 Green Plants by Andy Lin http://www.istockphoto.com/user_view.php?id=3021132