Dust

AI Swarms with RxJs

Project Goal

Explore the RxJs API by managing moving particle systems. The systems should:

• Use self-aware AI, not a global AI
• Move in organic, natural arcs, with no sudden pivots or swerves
• Support large swarms of particles
• Be able to evade obstacles
• Exhibit flocking behavior

Exploration 1: Organic movement at 32fps

The trickiest portion of this iteration (and perhaps the whole project) was animating the curved paths:

• Elliptical geometry was the initial goal, but calculating arc length (to maintain a scalar speed) is quite difficult.
• Smoothstep cubic curves were also an option, but maintaining consistent entry and exit angles could affect performance for large groups.

The current design uses circular paths that allow smooth changes in both direction and rotation.

This method can handle quite a few particles.

Exploration 2: Grid-based vision

The next goal was to explore a grid-based vision system. Each particle owns a vision grid, which is compared against the global grid to detect collisions. Here's a small scale system, with the vision grid visualized:

Here's a large scale system.

The last goal was to play around with flocking behaviors: cohesion, separation, and alignment. Here's each of the three, with the vision grid visualized:

Exploration 3: Flocking patterns

The exploration is now complete: arc-based movement, independent AIs, grid-based vision, following patterns of cohesion, separation, alignment, with hazards, on a large scale: