FLASH 8: particle.swarm

Well, it's about time. I finally opened up Flash 8. I have to say I'm very impressed so far. The interface seems much cleaner, and the Mac version seems to finally work. I'll reserve judgement on that for a few weeks.

As a test, I wrote a Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm example, which has 60 independent agents looking for a target (in this case, the mouse). I implemented the very cool and really easy BlurFilter Class, giving the agents a bit of snazz. This was a quick, 1 hour example, so there are things that I'd like to fix, but I thought I'd post it anyways, in keeping with my promise to make everything open source.

I had this system running with as many as 100 agents, and it was looking fine... you PC folks could probably run 200 agents without too much problem.

So, check it out, then download the source and play around a little bit. Post in the forums if you have any questions or if you come up with something cool.

Here's a bit of info on Particle Swarm Optimization, for those interested.