Killer boids, flocking in circles!

In 1996 I wrote a boids applet in Java, and it was shown in art galleries and stuff. Those were wild and crazy times.

O'Reilly recently released Killer Game Programming in Java by Andrew Davison. A sample chapter about Flocking Boids [PDF] is available online, and it's a very interesting read. The design of the Java code in that chapter references an article I wrote describing the boids algorithms in pseudocode, which in turn was based on my old Java code. The book brings that code full-circle, and adds some cool predator/prey behaviour and obstacle avoidance. And real trigonometry -- luxury!

Apparently my idea of pseudocode at the time was an over-processed mash of Pascal and Basic, spooned out so as not to offend anyone's language preferences (or in order to offend everybody's equally). If you'd like to be offended in the language of your choice, there are also versions in C, Python and Javascript/DHTML linked on my boids page.