Programming large swarms

In this video, I show the principles behind a fairly simple way to program a large swarm of aggressive units/creatures. It can be made very efficient, making it suitable for real-time use in games. However, it could also work well if you are scripting for rendered animation.

I haven't gone into detail here on the maths involved in the steering and other movement calculations, so you'll need some knowledge of programming simple physics to make it work.

This technique was based on an article in "AI Game Programming Wisdom", edited by Steve Rabin. I highly recommend that series of books if you are interested in game development and/or artificiaI intelligence.

Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• programming
• swarm
• game development
• effects

[RossKilgariff]

Thanks for the video Pete :) I'm going to try to implement this in the shmup I'm working on in my spare time.

[ElusivePete]

@RossKilgariff Glad you like it! And that sounds cool -- I'd love to see what you come up with.

Just as a note, I think I got a bit in the video slightly wrong. In the patrol state, I said each unit steers by a constant amount. There is a steering constant (randomised for each unit), but it's applied as an inverse proportion of the unit's speed, within certain limits. That's not the only way to implement it, but it can give a nice simple swirling effect.

[barkeg050]

Wow, nice video! I've just begun to program something swarm like and this gives me a lot ideas! Thanks!