Rather than burying the lede, let me show you the final result, and work back from there.
Boids is a procedurally generated flocking behaviour developed by Craig Reynolds in 1986. If you have a minute, I’d highly recommend checking out his article on the algorithm, which touches on similar, contemporary works, and name drops a few entertainment projects Boids worked its way onto. Perhaps most notable is 1992’s Batman Returns, which used Boids to model this CGI bat swarm.
They also used it to for the CGI penguins marching through Gotham. Of course, the effect needs to be combined with a ton of animation and lighting work, but if we ignore the artistic silliness of the scene I’d say it’s held up pretty well.
I was told by a long standing industry veteran that Halo:CE used them to model the flood behaviour, but I couldn’t find any confirmation of that online. What I did find is this video showing Half Life’s implementation, which Valve unceremoniously shuttled off into a background detail at the end of the game.
You could argue that shows the limitation of Boids, as well as many other procedural generation algorithms that programmers tend to fall in love with. Most programming is incredibly boring, and most programmers have no artistic ability. As a result, they are easily seduced by the ability to make (mediocre) art through code, mistaking something technically impressive with something of value to the audience.
There is a reason why demoscenes, while mind blowing, have never made their way into anything other than demoscenes. Your jaw may drop when you realize that the executables that produced the above and below videos were less than 4KBs, but it’s not clear what specific purpose this witchcraft serves other than novelty.
The glass half empty view of Boids is that it’s one of these procedurally generated solutions in search of a problem. That as games became more graphically complex, the occasional rough edges you’d get using something like this became more noticeable. Or that there’s simply no value to swarms of things procedurally flying about, and the CPU cycles can be better spent elsewhere.
That’s a fair argument, but I can’t help but think that Boids is the kind of algorithm that gets woefully underused and underdeveloped in modern games. It’s crazy to me how simulation in games seems to have gone by the wayside. There’s a reason why people still point to FEAR and Half Life as the pinnacle of AI in First Person Shooters, both of which are over twenty years old. It’s not Boids per se, but it is downstream from the developers’ emphasis on procedural behaviour.
The last two games with AI that got anyone excited were Alien:Isolation (2014), and MGSV (2015), both over a decade old. I searched for interesting flocking behaviour in games, and the last one I got was from Gears of War, which is celebrating its twentieth birthday later this year. This suffocation of creative and artistic bankruptcy, while less immediately upsetting as something like Concord, or greedy micro transactions, is yet another result of the zionist control over the gaming industry, and Weimerica more broadly.
Still, it’s one thing to theorize, it’s another to find an actual implementation in a game, and I believe I have more than one very good candidate for this effect, that I will cover in the next piece. Also, I needed to blow off steam getting over the pain of the announcer.
