Re: Q:SIM_AGENT - like displays with SWARM?

[Jan Kreft]

On Tue, 13 Apr 1999, Eric Werk wrote:

> Have you seen the movies made with the SIM_AGENT package? Take a look:
> 
> http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/cog_affect/sim_demo/sim_movies.html
> 
> I think they look rather nice, I like the way the agents moved in
> continuous space and were represented by easily-identifiable characters.
> I was wondering how to make a similar graphic output with the SWARM
> system, for my agents. 
> 
> Has anybody done anything like this?
> Are there tools in the SWARM GUI library for this?
> Is Tk/Tcl able to do this kind of thing?

Hi Erik,

this may not be what you want, but I've begun to do the following:

Save position, size, label, whatever, of every agent every n steps into
file #n, in a suitable format.

Load those files into POV-Ray and render bitmaps of the scenes with your
agents. The labels of the agents should correspond to texture definitions
like make agent foo a red sphere etc.

>From the stack of bitmaps thus obtained, make a movie.

This procedure is very flexible, e.g. poss also for 3D, and the rendering
is done after the simulation only when you need it.

Just a thought,

Jan.

Jan Kreft                               Phone +44 (0)1222 876036
Cardiff School of Biosciences           Fax   +44 (0)1222 874305
Cardiff University                      E-mail address@hidden
PO Box 915, Cardiff CF1 3TL, UK



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