After great deliberation, I finally decided to create a flocking system for my 2nd year programming project. I was intrigued how a computer program could be used to create such beautiful, natural movement. A great inspiration for this project was the following video showing a murmuration of birds accompanied by a beautiful soundtrack.
[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/31158841]

I was also inspired by images of fish shoals avoiding predators, and decided this kind of movement was what I wanted to achieve with my flocking system. I wanted to allow users to manage how the flock moved by creating controls for all the behaviours as well as some of the base variables of the boids (fish/birds). I was really happy with the result I achieved and find that once again this assignment has left me wanting to know even more about programming.

The system is based on the classic Reynolds Flocking system, with the three main behaviours (separation, cohesion and alignment) all being implemented along with a few of my own additions. Special thanks goes to Daniel Shiffman and his book The Nature of Code, which proved extremely useful for understanding some of the basics involved in such a system. The program was written in C++ with QT Creator for OpenGL, using the NCCA’s own coding standard and library which can be found here. I would like to thank our lecturer Jon Macey for this years teaching; it’s been extremely useful.