From Wikipedia: Boids is an artificial life program, developed by Craig Reynolds in 1986, which simulates the flocking behaviour of birds. The name “boid” corresponds to a shortened version of “bird-oid object”, which refers to a bird-like object.
I am going to show you, in a series of posts, how to simulate a flocking behavior and how to use it in other projects which have nothing to do with flocking.
First, a couple of references: you may find interesting the official Boids page by Craig Reynolds, and also the pseudo code by Conrad Parker.
We’ll divide the tutorial step by step, and in the first step we’ll see how to accomplish to the first Boids rule.
Rule 1: Boids try to fly towards the centre of mass of neighbouring boids.