This post a day thing is great, it’s really made me kick some stuff into gear.

I love flocking behaviors, they’re awesome.
What are Flocking Behaviors?

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They were created in the 1980’s from by Criag Renolds, the gist of it is that using 3 simple behaviors, surprisingly complex motion can be formed when you have many actors ( Referred to as Boids, i think Craig meant it as a another way of saying Birds, a more new york way).

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The three rules are simple, i’ll explain them as i know them but im no expert.
Separation: Boids want to stay a little away from each other, some elbow room.
Cohesion: Boids want to be grouped, as long as they dont get too close they violate rule 1
Alignment: Boids within a certain range, care about which way other boids are going.

Simple right? Anyway, it makes for very pretty stuff.

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A few months ago a friend of mine gave a talk based on Kieth Peters book AdvancED ActionScript 3.0 Animation (a great book). This re-sparked my interest in them, and with my on going interest in iphone development – I decided to try and port Kieth Peters code to Objective-C as best I could with the more limited knowledge I had at the time.

It actually didn’t work all that great, but, I came across SoulWire’s interpretation of Flocking (also in AS3), and I ported that. Maybe it was because it was my second attempt at porting, but this time I got really great results.
200 Objects flocking, all aware of every single other one, on a tiny iphone in your hand, that was very rewarding.
The problem was that I used Box2D’s point class B2Vec2, and then i modified it a little to boot, because I wanted to add a few operators it didn’t have built in. So it left me with something I could not really share with anyone else, and also it was now Combining Objective-C and C++, which always seems like you should avoid it whenever possible.

This was many months ago (march according to my SVN), and i had my fun playing with it and left it at that.
However, recently on the Cocos2D forums someone brought up making a heat seeking missile and I mentioned that stearing behaviors would be a great for that, if maybe over complicated but being a game forum – you worry about that less as it might be a great jumping platform from which additional gameplay ideas stem.

I decided I would revisit my class, as I had been wanting to for a long time, and re-write it using only CGPoints so that it could be pure Objective-C.

This was the result:

LittleBirds from mario gonzalez on Vimeo.

Here’s how to use the class:

// Creating it
boid = [Boid spriteWithSpriteSheet:_sheet rect: boidRect];
[boid setSpeedMax: 2.0f andSteeringForceMax: 1.0f];
[boid setWanderingRadius: 16.0f lookAheadDistance: 40.0f andMaxTurningAngle:0.2f];

// On your update function
while(boid)
	{
		Boid* b = boid;
		boid = b->_next;
		[b wander: 0.19f];
		[b 
		 flock:_flockPointer
		 withSeparationWeight:0.6f
		 andAlignmentWeight:0.1f
		 andCohesionWeight:0.2f
		 andSeparationDistance:10.0f
		 andAlignmentDistance:30.0f
		 andCohesionDistance:20.0f
		 ];
	
		[b flee:badThingPosition panicAtDistance:5 usingMultiplier:0.6f]; // avoid touch
		[b seek:yummyFoodPosition withinRange:75 usingMultiplier:0.35f]; // go towards touch
                [b update];
	}

The class may be downloaded here:
BoidsExample Version 0.2

It’s coded to the best of my ability, if you have (impactful) optimizations please share.

Update #1:
Fixed Flocking example class linked list creation bug.

Simple rules combine to make seemingly complex behaviors: