• Updated 2023-07-12: Hello, Guest! Welcome back, and be sure to check out this follow-up post about our outage a week or so ago.

wanted - flocking i.e. boids classic mac program

Juror22

Well-known member
Back in the late '80s -early 90's we had an assortment of computers in our university's library, which included some Mac SE's.  I remember finding a flocking simulation on one of them and I have looked for it ever since.  I don't know the exact name of it, but it seemed to be an excellent implementation of the Boids algorithm.  Has anyone seen anything like this?  It was capable of running smoothly on a Mac SE.  I would at least like to know what the name of it was, but I would love to be able to run it again on one of my Mac SE's.

 

sstaylor

Well-known member
I remember seeing it, but I don't recall a name.  Seems like it was a screensaver though.

If I come up with anything I'll let you know

 

beachycove

Well-known member
Im pretty sure it was an After Dark screensaver module.
Well, who could forget the flying toilets?

And then there's this, with everything flocking, from gulls to sperm to moths to helicopters:



 
Last edited by a moderator:

Juror22

Well-known member
Thanks for the suggestions so far, but these are not what I saw.  The ones in the After Dark module behave almost like brownian movement, where the one that I'm looking for moved like the ones in this video, between 15 - 21 secs.

Original Boids video

 

beachycove

Well-known member
One more lead: According to this page https://www.red3d.com/cwr/boids/ , there was a relevant third party After Dark module called Buzzz!

The hyperlink given on that page brings me to here http://www.smfr.org/computing/archaic/afterdark/ , but alas, this only offers a dead link to a ppc version of Buzzz! Perhaps there was an earlier version, however, and possibly some ferriting around in After Dark archives here and there will turn it up.

There is lots of period information on the first page referenced, btw, including programming options, etc. I suppose it's possible it was custom software that you witnessed, given that it was seen in a Uni Library, but it would make a lot more sense for it to have been a screen saver in that context, given that those machines often ran  24/7 or something close to it.

 
Last edited by a moderator:

Juror22

Well-known member
I tracked down a couple of the pages listed, including their files, (with the help of the IA Wayback machine) and found a couple of promising files that I will check out.

I'll let you know what I find.  Thanks!

 

Juror22

Well-known member
None of the boid AD modules that I found were what I was looking for, but in the process of looking through them and based on beachycove's comments, I came across something that was a similar animation.  I think it was actually a swarm variant that I recall.  There is a swarm AD module for 68K (the version that I found was 1.5 and it included the source code).  Running it confirmed for me that it was not what I am looking for, but I am definitely getting closer.  The screensaver was basically small rays of light drawn on a dark background and I know the one that I remember was dark figures drawn on a light background, with very similar behavior.

I think that I have a line on the buzzz module, so I will check that out and see what it contains as well.

The swarm 1.5 AD module runs fine on my LCIII, but I doubt that it will run on an SE (based on the documentation), so I think I'm looking for an early version of a swarm program, as opposed to a screensaver, but I'm willing to look at anything that might be close.

Thanks to all that have helped so far, I've come farther in the last week than I have in several years of looking.

 

lobust

Well-known member
Darkside of the Mac had a Boids module that would have run fine on an SE...

Boids DSoM.jpg

 
Last edited by a moderator:
Top