Coding Adventure: Boids
Why Stack Overflow recommends it
Stack Overflow users link it when someone needs a clear, visual introduction to boids and a practical way to do obstacle avoidance by casting rays around an entity.
Recommended by 1 people across 1 different months, 2020 to 2020.
What it is
Sebastian Lague builds a 3D flocking simulation in Unity based on the classic boids rules of separation, alignment and cohesion. He adds obstacle avoidance by casting rays spread over a sphere, detours into spiral point distributions, and finishes with an optimized obstacle course and animated fish.
What people said
Recommends Wzrd · 2020-07 · Stack Overflow · on “Determining which direction to rotate a character in unity?”
Boids are used to simulate things like a flock of birds or a school of fish. If you're interested, here's a cool video about them: [this video]
Cites Sove67 · 2020-04 · Stack Overflow · on “NullReferenceException when accessing an IEnumerable<T> of a custom class”
Goal I am designing a boid [LINK] system using Unity. I deal with the awareness radius by adding a boid to the "Swarm" list when it enters a collider. In order to find the force for each boid, I need to cycle through the swarm list, access the "Boid" class, and retrieve velocity and position. Problem The Boid classes from each swarm entity are added to a new list, and passed to the physics controller. However, a NullReferenceException is thrown at line 96, and I don't understand why that variable would be null. As far as I know, accessing a populated Enumerable<Boid> using foreach should have variables within. NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object Boid.
Cites Ethan Ma · 2020-08 · Stack Overflow · on “Implementing Raycasting for pathfinding LWJGL”
I am currently working on a project involving procedurally generated underwater terrain using 3d Simplex noise and the marching cubes algorithm. Right now I have made my character model as well as generated the terrain mesh. Since the project is based in the water, I wanted to add fish and other entities to make it more realistic. I have read the basic on boids [LINK] and have already created the program for entities to interact in a 3d space. However the problem I have been stuck on is having the entities interacting with obstacles. The method used in this video [this video] is by casting rays in a sphere around the entity and detecting whether or not a ray is intersecting with the obstacle. My