Boid Twitch/Forcefield Fix

[Xevion]

This is most likely one of those problems that may never go away without deep investigation or violent changes to the code - or may go away with just a few lines of code.

Boids tend to bounce of other boids much too violently, they 'twitch' and hit what one could call invisible 'force fields' on other boids. Sometimes the separation range used is so small that the line between a simple physics collision and an actual separation rule is largely gone.

This fix could improve the quality of the base mechanism of the whole application. A method to 'smooth' Boid movements is needed.

[Xevion]

After implementing Sebastian Lague's method for applying and calculating velocity (using Time.deltaTime in particular), as well as new clamp/lerp/speed calculations, the boids move much smoother.

As a side effect however, they separate very slowly and large groups can pass through eachother while barely even trying to separate. Collisions are the norm.

Additionally, I'm a little worried that all of this code wasn't even the problem with my application - while debugging I noticed that my Separation Range was double my Group Range. They were quite literally operating with a forcefield like tendency while alignment and cohesion were balanced to just barely get the Boids to line up.

And now, another problem has arisen - It's very easy to get the Boids to combine into large flocks by adjusting even a single Bias. I don't really know what's going on.

Regardless, twitching has been fixed. See #19 for changes.

[Xevion]

Associated C# Scripts by Sebastian Lague used

• Boid.cs
• BoidManager.cs
• BoidHelper.cs