This morning I downloaded and ran Frock, a flocking chicken simulation written in Lua with Löve (a 2D game framework for Lua).

Why? Not entirely sure, except that I remember bird flocking simulations from college and thinking they were cool, and it turns out that Frock is hosted on GitHub. It is sort of oddly fascinating to watch. If you want to help, the author, wilhelm, is looking for some help with the algorithm for finding neighbor chickens.

My immediate goal is to make it support more chickens, so I can get a whole swarm of them. Right now, I’m using an inefficient algorithm to calculate which chickens are neighbors (basically n^2 comparisons). So if any of you have good culling techniques applicable here, I’d love to hear it. I’m currently looking at R-trees.

Just in case you’re in the mood for a little Lua Löve this morning.