Boids!

Boids is a simple artificial life simulation that mimicks the flocking behaviour of birds. This implementation of Boids was written in Haskell by Hawk Weisman and Willem Yarbrough for Computer Science 383 at Allegheny College.

Building Boids

You can build boids with cabal install -j in the project's root directory. If you plan on working on a lot of other Haskell projects on your system, you may want to run cabal sandbox init first, in order to manage boids' dependencies independantly of those of other Haskell projects.

Running Boids

To run our simulation, just launch the boids executable, which Cabal will build to dist/build/boids/boids.

boids supports the following command-line parameters:

Boids
  -d         --debug              Draw boids in debug mode
  -c         --cohesive           Cohesive boid behaviour
  -s         --swarm              Swarming boid behaviour
  -e         --equal              Equal-weighted boid behaviour
  -x HEIGHT  --height=HEIGHT      Window height (pixels)
  -y WIDTH   --width=WIDTH        Window width (pixels)
  -n BOIDS   --num=BOIDS          Number of boids in the simulation
  -v RADIUS  --visibility=RADIUS  Boid visibility radius
                                  Default is 50
  -p SPEED   --speed=SPEED        Higher values make boids move slower.
                                  Default is 1000 at 30fps.
  -h         --help               Show this help file