I was thrilled to see a post by Long Nguyen over the weekend, announcing his publication of a Dynamo package called WhatTheFlock – with full source code – that implements a flocking simulation. This work is significant not because ornithologists will use Dynamo to predict or simulate murmurations (although that in itself is a fun thought) but because Long has demonstrated a valuable technique that might be used to implement other arguably more useful types of multi-agent simulation inside Dynamo.
Long is using a background process to perform calculations before rendering the results into the Dynamo window. A really useful and interesting pattern.
My first thought on seeing the flocking agents placed randomly in a cube was “wouldn’t it be cool to be able to set their positions from a point cloud?” I could just imagine scans of spaces erupting into flocks of birds. Again, not especially useful, but lots and lots of fun.
I posted the suggestion in a comment and Long was quick…