A new week and a new game. The start of game 4 wich should’ve been last friday was a bit delayed for personal reasons, but after working a few hours this weekend i’m back on track. The new words are pope and traffic jam. My plan was to make a “god game” where you help the pope in his neat car navigate through a mass of people, cars or something.
I did some reading up on flocking behaviour because I figured that’d be a nice emergent system much like the springs/IK stuff I’ve used in previous games. Pretty soon I found Boids. A very neat way of simulating flock/school behaviour, i also found some pseudocode wich greatly helped in implementing the technique in flash.

However there is a problem, it’s too slow for what I originally inteded to use it for. I barely get 25fps with pink box graphics and 20 boids flying around. I wanted alot more.
I did manage to push the fps a bit by using various optimizing techniques, but it’s still not fast enough. I think I might be able to get it a bit faster, but my original idea of a car traveling through tons of people won’t be doable anyways.

I might do a spin on angry muslims chasing the pope, a bit of politics in your games makes for interesting results.