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Tuesday
Jun302009

Gnat

I like to code in Processing. It does all the hard parts of graphics for you, so you can just concentrate on the coding. I have some back code that will get posted eventually (hopefully) but for now I'm going to share a project that I've been working on recently. Late on night in my room, I wanted to code something but couldn't think of what to code. As I sat there pondering, a gnat was bumbling around in front of my computer screens. I noticed that it had a weird flight pattern. It looked like it almost jumped from one place to another randomly, but with some overall directional sway. I realized this is what I should code, so I did and here is the fruit on my labors. Or at least a relatively stable, version that incorporates a decent amount of features yet still pretty early on in the evolution of the code. It's after the jump (so it doesn't run on load, cause my programs are usually a bit processor intensive)

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Source code: gnat

As you can see it's pretty basic, but what I did to make it work was have a "gnat" jump to a random position within a certain range. The position swayed in the direction of the "food" this way the gnat jumps around randomly but with an overall movement towards the food.

 

Built with Processing

 

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