Pug’s Place

For those of you who regularly read my blog, you can skip this entry. It’s just a compilation of what I’ve said so far about SCHUA so that I can have one post which covers everything. At Dr. Fishwick’s suggestion, I’m going to post SCHUA to the Processing exhibition page.

My CAP 5805 term simulation project was SCHUA, my Schooling User-Interactive Aquarium. Yeah, the acronym sucks, but it’s pretty. SCHUA is a simulation of fish, dolphins and sharks (and fish food) in a 3D spherical aquarium. All entities have agent-based artificial intelligences and school, hunt, eat, avoid other species and generally stay alive.

This simulation showcases emergent behaviour - complicated behaviour made up of a blend of simpler sub-behaviours. It is an extension of Boids, a bird flocking simulation created by Craig Reynolds in 1986. SCHUA is drawn in 3D with OpenGL, has multiple species with unique characteristics, Newtonian physics and additional behaviors such as hunting.

The sliders on the left change the coefficients which blend different behaviours of the fishes, and the smaller buttons on the right add more agents of various species to the aquarium.

It’s rather cool to watch. The fish school around, trying to avoid predators and unfamiliar species. When you add fish food, they go up and feed on it. The dolphins streak around the aquarium eating fish, and the sharks lurk around munching on living targets of opportunity (including dolphins). I’ve faked underwater lighting with texture maps, so light ripples across their bodies as the agents move. You can rotate the aquarium around and zoom in/out.

Further stuff you can look at:

• The project’s demonstration video is online at Google Video. You’ll need Flash to play it: SCHUA Demo on Google Video If there’s demand, I can put up a DivX and MsMpeg4 copy on Archive.org within about a week.
• The final report has detailed pseudocode of all of the algorithms involved as well as more details on how everything works. It’s online here: SCHUA Final Report (PDF).
• The source code can only be compiled and run with Processing, a Java simulation package. Luckily, Processing needs nothing more than a java environment to run, so it’s easy to install and easy to work with. Just uncompress SCHUA into your processing “sketch” directory, which defaults to “My Documents\Processing” in Windows. Processing is very simple to use, so even people with only a basic knowledge of using a compiler should be able to make SCHUA work. This FAQ entry and its links may be helpful for anyone giving Processing a try. SCHUA Source Code Release 1 for Processing, released under the X license.