I read about the boids library for pd, and got all excited about it, only to get stumped as to how to load and implement it. So I coded my own boids algorithm in perl, and socketed it into pd. If you care to take a peak, unzip the circleflies.zip and have at it.

Some steps to take:

open a shell and cd to the CIRCLEFLIES directory, then execute the STARTME.pl like so:
perl STARTME.pl

and then open the "circleflyflock.pd" with your Gem flag loaded.

For extra fun, the swarm of circles has a few musicians in it (the green ones) they output midi on midi channel1. You can also control the colors using the synesthes boxes if the blue and green gets old.

I hope you find this fun! If anyone wants to hack at the perl, please help me make it more efficient! it eats a lot of my CPU, and I'd like to run it more often with a bigger swarm.

Bzzzz!

http://www.pdpatchrepo.info/hurleur/CIRCLEFLIES.zip

one of the things that slows this script down is all of the index referencing I'm doing. for v2.0 of the script, I intend to do 2 things; run through all lists by shifting and popping, to speed it up, and extend the script to ndimensional swarms, rather than the 3 that this version has.

The swarm is going to be comprised of these little guys when it's efficient, too. For the upcoming performance, my conspirator is lending me an alienware laptop with a beast of a gpu. (for a laptop, anyway)

http://www.pdpatchrepo.info/hurleur/firefliyflock.pd

I don't know Perl, so here's a swarm of minibangs in Pd + Lua (via pdlua)

First part: the 100-line script, based on this reference:

http://www.vergenet.net/~conrad/boids/pseudocode.html

http://www.pdpatchrepo.info/hurleur/swarm.pd_lua

and second the help patch, excuse the patching style, I was feeling too lazy to patch abstractions etc, brain dead copy and paste suits the morning

http://www.pdpatchrepo.info/hurleur/swarm-help.pd

Haven't gotten LUA interpreters installed yet, but it looks awesome. Did you write the lua script into a pd object? How does one go about doing that? is there a way to do that in python or perl?

I wrote a loader to embed Lua into Pd, so you can write Pd objects in Lua.

svn co https://code.goto10.org/svn/maximus/pdlua

There is a similar project for python (py/pyext):

http://lists.puredata.info/pipermail/pd-list/2008-06/063178.html

Flext is a layer for C++ externals. Not heard of a loader for Perl. GridFlow used to support Ruby, but no longer. I wrote one for Haskell too, but that bitrotted/became unmaintainable. Think there are loaders for Java and the Common Language Runtime out there somewhere too, or at least they have been talked about.

So, plenty of choices of languages for extending Pd - but for high performance like a flock of a thousand I think I'd revert to using C.

yeah, no doubt. It should have an SQL databse one can query and update for flock positions, too. But boy, I hate c/c++.

pyext is precisely my cup of tea, on the other hand!