Coding Assignment – Week #2

This week’s project was inspired by ducks and their swimming movement. Here is a short calming 5 hour video of the phenomenon in question:

Here is the sketch:

As I was scrolling through my camera roll, I noticed that I had quite a few videos of ducks swimming by the shore of a pond. I remembered the mouse tracking example task that we did last class, and it occurred to me that the walker was moving in a similar fashion like the ducks following a human on the shore who is holding a piece of bread. I thus wanted to alter the code of the task to simulate a group of swimming ducks.

To translate this idea into code, I decided to create a scenario where the ducks were drawn towards a fish instead of a human with bread, adding a more natural and engaging touch. Additionally, I aimed to introduce a bit of unpredictability to mimic real-life scenarios by randomizing the number of ducks with each sketch as they swim in both smaller and larger groups. Since they often come together in one spot, I wanted them to form circular patterns while changing positions.

In order to achieve this, I used object-oriented programming to create the duck objects, and vectors to simulate their movement. For instance, I employed vectors to determine the distance between each duck and the fish cursor. This enabled me to simulate the ducks’ natural tendency to swim toward a target, just like real ducks follow food. By calculating these distances and adjusting the ducks’ directions accordingly, this behavior was replicated in code.

The part of the code for which I was proud of was the snipet where I tried to make the ducks avoid collisions. To achieve that I needed to calculate a ‘pushForce’ vector that points away from the current duck, which was then assigned as a new acceleration vector. Here is the snipet:

avoidCollisions(ducks) {
    let avoidance = createVector(0, 0);
    
    //Looping through each of the ducks
    for (let i = 0; i < ducks.length; i++) {
      // Checking if the current duck being checked is not the same as this duck
      if (ducks[i] !== this) {
        // Calculating the distance between this duck and the current duck in the loop
        let distance = p5.Vector.dist(this.position, ducks[i].position);
        // Checking if the distance is less than the desired distance
        if (distance < minDistance ) {
          // // Calculating a 'pushForce' vector that points away from the current duck
          let pushForce = p5.Vector.sub(this.position, ducks[i].position);
          // Setting the magnitute
          pushForce.setMag(0.1); 
          // Adding the 'pushForce' vector to the 'avoidance' vector
          avoidance.add(pushForce);
        }
      }
    }
    // Changing the acceleration to the 'avoidance' vector
    this.acceleration = avoidance;
  }

Although the movement of the fish was not my main concern, I was very satisfied with how it turned out. The little glitches that occur during the cursor movement actually appear similar to how smaller fish actually tend to have uneven swimming patterns and often do sudden turns and unexpected movements.

For further improvements, I would love to make the ducks also swim in a V like shape, where one of them would take the lead and others would stay a little behind forming the V. Another idea could be to simulate the ducks going underwater and disappearing for a while why they attempt to catch the fish. Of course, it would also be a big plus to improve the visual appearance of the ducks, and perhaps simulate some water movement as well.