Just Boids | Useless Game Dev

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Boids are cool! I like seeing flocks of birds in video games, or schools of fishes swimming around. Join me in attempting to not thermal throttle my computer while putting as many "bird-oids" on screen!
More reading/watching on this subject:
- Check out Unity 2023 and its new features here: unity.com/releases/editor/wha...
- Flock, Herds and School: A Distributed Behavioral Model, Craig W. Reynolds www.cs.toronto.edu/~dt/siggra...
- Fog of war tutorial by MinionsArt: / 17804712
Music:
"Carpe Diem" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
creativecommons.org/licenses/b...
"Wholesome" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
creativecommons.org/licenses/b...
Other Credits:
- Sebastian Lague's Boids video • Coding Adventure: Boids
Support the channel on Patreon to get extra content, and access to the source code of all projects!
/ uselessgamedev
Follow me on Twitter, not that I tweet that often: / uselessgamedev
Kappa Avatar art by Boskoop www.artstation.com/boskoop
And as always, have a good one!
#unity #gamedev #indiedev #devlog

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Опубликовано:

17 авг 2023

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Комментарии : 153

@404findnotnamed 10 месяцев назад

Boids will be boids

@uselessgamedev 10 месяцев назад

I'm pinning this.

@404findnotnamed 10 месяцев назад

@@uselessgamedev Much obliged, wise CoderKappa

@revimfadli4666 10 месяцев назад

Me and the boids:

@404findnotnamed 10 месяцев назад

@@revimfadli4666 we moving in synchronous cellular automaton fashion

@ince55ant 9 месяцев назад

sick of this boids club humour

@hexeldev 10 месяцев назад

I actually met Craig (the inventor of Boids) last week. He's a cool guy, 70, and still doing cool stuff. Recently on entities camouflaging themselves using a GAN

@uselessgamedev 10 месяцев назад

Oh nice! I should look that up

@kalelsoffspring 10 месяцев назад

The intro is perfect for your channel name. "Games that have extra CPU cycles" and wanting to use them is a pretty good definition for "useless", but it's also amazing!!!

@benjoe1993 10 месяцев назад

🎵Two boids, chillin' in the hot tub, 5 feet apart because🎵...the separation has already been implemented.

@AdrianMRyan 10 месяцев назад

This is incredibly not-useless for the project I'm currently working on. Also, glad to see a new video! Was hoping we'd see you back soon.

@uselessgamedev 10 месяцев назад

Thank you!

@jacopodelbo5122 7 месяцев назад

Great man, you got me curious now. What are u working on?

@redearth3234 10 месяцев назад

I love how these behaviors can arise from a very simple set of rules

@billal7185 10 месяцев назад

You get a lot of info across in a short time in a way that isn't overwhelming. Doing Sebastian Lague's landmass generator series right now and think I'll follow this one hands-on next. Cheers!

@Incernion 10 месяцев назад

I was hoping you'd cover this topic, boids are so simple in nature but I love them so much!

@redumptious2544 10 месяцев назад

The 'woosh' always makes me smile. Great stuff as always

@uselessgamedev 10 месяцев назад

I'm slowly building up a sound bank of mouth-made SFX it's coming along nicely

@charlvanniekerk8009 9 месяцев назад

I absolutely love the optimization quad data structure and how cleverly you managed to increase performance. Thank you for the wonderful video!

@Acerola_t 10 месяцев назад

10:14 that guy seems so handsome

@nazihboudaakkar8117 10 месяцев назад

the man himself

@SponkADonk 4 месяца назад

lol nice

@sempersolus5511 10 месяцев назад

I supposedly have a master's in complexity. I don't know half the crap you do. This channel totally helps. EDIT: I can confirm the English word is indeed "octant".

@chikato7106 9 месяцев назад

Ooooh crap I've been working on my own version of this but literally got Unity to BSOD my computer... This is a great guide that will correct my ship! Thanks! Subbed and put on alerts.

@evanwatson2898 9 месяцев назад

Thank god unity was kind enough to sponsor this video, happy to know they care about their devs😊

@chrissugg968 10 месяцев назад

You should have them speed up and slow down as well as steer, and an animation of flapping/gliding when they do this or when they gain/lose altitude. You could also have Stamina which makes 'tired' boids more likely to glide and stops the lead boid just powering away on full throttle.

@Dominik-K 10 месяцев назад

Amazing video and it's great that you mentioned Compute Shaders

@benjoe1993 10 месяцев назад

I feel like those birds need a bit stronger forces on the separation rule...they were colliding a lot in the center. But that's just settings. Cool video as always! And thanks for showing off the new Unity features.

@uselessgamedev 10 месяцев назад

Thanks! Indeed it seems like I have used the wrong separation weight there

@MFKitten 10 месяцев назад

I first learned the word "boids" when looking through the Half-Life character models.

@birdboys1877 10 месяцев назад

Unity sponsorship lets GOOOO

@blablafoof 9 месяцев назад

I really like this flocking video.

@Metcoler 10 месяцев назад

The result was beautiful... Nice video!

@critopadolf5534 9 месяцев назад

those new async functions are awesome!

@onsewatch 10 месяцев назад

Learn something new everytime here! The async stuff sounds honestly magical (as someone who has always been scared of parallelisation), gotta check that out for sure. I noticed in both your 2D and 3D example your boids tend to get really close together or even kind of "collide" - did you take out the avoidance rule at some point or is that intentional? In my experiments i gave each rule a weight parameter to be able to adjust how "flock-likely" different types of boids could be, and i noticed at least in early versions for some reason i always had to slightly decrease the cohesion factor to avoid "collisions"... Thanks for the video, looking forward to learning and then teaching me compute shaders!

@uselessgamedev 10 месяцев назад

I did not remove rules but I did tweak the weights of each rule and probably should have had a higher weight for separation. Async executes on the main thread by default but if you parallelise it using BackgroundThreadAsync you will still run into concurrency issues so you *should* be scared. I'm terrified of parallel stuff also haha

@morgansinclair6318 9 месяцев назад

Reminds me of the 1987 CGI short, Stanley & Stella in Breaking the Ice, only now we can do it in real time at much higher fidelity. Amazing, isn't it.

@ITR 10 месяцев назад

They added native await support? that's amazing

@KVVUZRSCHK 10 месяцев назад

Hmm in the end demo it looks like the separation rule was not quite met, as there were several birds clumping together, looking very unnatural. There were some outlier birds, keeping distance to a cluster, almost looked like an atomic nucleus and electrons. This might be because the center boids have the sum of their "avoidance forces" be 0 as they're equally clumped together by the "electron boids" which circulate around them?

@heeyy3 10 месяцев назад

i love shader computing :)

@hilellasry 10 месяцев назад

Loved your graphics!

@uselessgamedev 10 месяцев назад

Thanks!

@lemmmakestunes8312 10 месяцев назад

youtube compression is gonna love this one

@unconcernedsalad2 10 месяцев назад

commenting to help the algorithm, great stuff

@gambitossir5985 10 месяцев назад

nice video :)))) Acerola whha? LOL

@bluesillybeard 10 месяцев назад

I was using async+await in Unity back in 2022, C# has that built-in. Although I'm glad Unity is able to integrate with it better than it used to.

@uselessgamedev 10 месяцев назад

Support for c# async await has indeed been available for a while but not unity has actually implemented stuff you can await like waiting for the next frame. It's a game changer

@bluesillybeard 10 месяцев назад

@@uselessgamedev Yeah, I forgot to mention how annoying it was to actually get the async code to integrate with Unity nicely

@igorthelight 9 месяцев назад

"Just me and the boids" ;-)

@sebbl580 10 месяцев назад

Your videos are very cool :)

@CaioAletroca 10 месяцев назад

Dude, they finally added async/await standard support (like JS and C#) in Unity apparently this took so long for them... Welp, I'm glad it's here now. btw, great video!!

@uselessgamedev 10 месяцев назад

It has been here for a while is just wasn't very useful because it wasn't well integrated with Unity. you couldn't await for the next frame or await for in-game time, which made it sort of useless. But you could use async functions before

@CaioAletroca 10 месяцев назад

@@uselessgamedev Yes, that was the situation last time I checked out. Basically useful for stuff not related to Unity itself (like serialization for save files)

@papernathan_ 9 месяцев назад

Watching starling murmuration feels like you could cheat the 3D by using perlin noise as a height map for your boids.

@_DRMR_ 10 месяцев назад

Super interesting overview and nice examples. This has certainly given me some ideas for "emergent behavior" from move data particles (which could be used for anything! granular wavetable synthesis anyone?)

@VRWarLab 10 месяцев назад

I would love to see this in Unity 2021 uuuugghhh

@uselessgamedev 10 месяцев назад

I don't think it will be backported. Maybe to 2022 but even that, there's no reason to

@VRWarLab 10 месяцев назад

@@uselessgamedev Well, new unity versions are slower and cluttered with stuff. I'm developing for VR and the newer versions are trash for this...

@shooterdefronvrps2 10 месяцев назад

this could be interrest if you could give a target other than unexplored zone, likeuse boids for group of ants that goes to a food zone and back, or moths that flock randonly but when near lamp they hover around it

@mic27381 2 месяца назад

Love your content , im always exited for new vids, can u ask u, how are you animating your videos?

@uselessgamedev 2 месяца назад

Hi thank you! I use Adobe Premiere for 99% of the editing, and sometimes when there's a particularly tricky shot I animate it in Unity using shaders/scripts. Probably not the best option but that's what I'm most familiar with, I'm not very good at video editing

@empty5013 9 месяцев назад

Vector fields can be a good alternative method to optimise and can get you closer to O(n) complexity. The tricky part is calculating the field efficiently, but if you do it right you should only need to sample each boid's position and heading once. Conceptually you are generating a heatmap of boid density and average boid direction, and sampling that map instead of querying neighbouring boids. You can get tremendous speedups this way and it GPU-ifies nicely since it maps nicely to the concept of textures.

@empty5013 9 месяцев назад

in 3D it will be cumbersome on memory though! 3D textures are still difficult for our hardware to cope with, its just such a huge amount of data!

@eMallard 9 месяцев назад

Congrats on the sponsor

@davidmcbride5357 10 месяцев назад

wait this is Awsome!

@SombreroMan716 10 месяцев назад

Mother flocking birds was too good

@MFKitten 10 месяцев назад

Ideally you would have them keep equal distances from one another too. I see they kinda clump together.

@no-lifenoah7861 10 месяцев назад

I fuckin love the boid algorithm lmao

@albingrahn5576 10 месяцев назад

I LOVE BOIDS ❤

@arrowsdev 9 месяцев назад

that's cool seriously

@f0kes32 10 месяцев назад

next step is compute shaders

@badfitz66 9 месяцев назад

I'm wondering - is a quadtree the best way to partition the space for boids? I've done a lot of Boid simulations in a lot of different lanauges (C#, Rust, Lua, etc) found a generic sparse spatial hash seems to work better for performance. Good video either way!

@uselessgamedev 9 месяцев назад

I don't know what "the best way" is, I bet a sparse spatial hash would work great too. I should also test the performance differences between quadtree and kd-tree but maybe another day

@amyshaw893 10 месяцев назад

WOOOOO! My favourite game developing tortoise!

@diodorent8161 10 месяцев назад

Take a sip everytime he says boids

@monotonedevelopment 10 месяцев назад

Me and the homies fr

@codeway4374 10 месяцев назад

Nice vid !

@uselessgamedev 10 месяцев назад

Thanks!

@sfdntk 10 месяцев назад

I love that the "swoosh" sound effect when your avatar pops up is literally just you making a "swoosh" sound, haha. Excellent video too, such a simple and effective way to describe the mechanics of such a ubiquitous concept. I especially appreciate the time you spent on optimisation.

@uselessgamedev 10 месяцев назад

Thanks! Indeed all sound effects are now mouth-made since the Moebius video. Slowly building up to a sizeable sound bank haha

@xamtems 10 месяцев назад

Heyo I'm currently taking an intro into computer Science course, and am really interested in the type of unity linked coding I see you do, but I was wondering what coding language you use?

@uselessgamedev 10 месяцев назад

Hi! Unity uses C#

@shohamtzubery8456 10 месяцев назад

That's cool! I wonder how it compares with DOTS

@rhapsodyaria 10 месяцев назад

You could probably get a performance boost by pre-calculating the scene colliders into a distance field or something. Could even speed that up by limiting the distance it calculates to the view distance of the boids. It'd be _much_ faster to fetch from the distance field than have to check for surrounding colliders. Though if you wanted to get fancy and have it move towards the area with least density, you'd be doing 6-8 fetches per boid, which would still not be ideal. I'd wager it's still faster than checking for physics collisions though.

@uselessgamedev 10 месяцев назад

A SDF would actually be usable by a compute shader so that's a pretty great suggestion, thanks!

@aaaaaa8410 10 месяцев назад

Odd 6:37 . Even with O(n^2) the framerate for 15 boids should be higher than with O(log(n)) with 1000 boids. Did you have some other tweaks?

@uselessgamedev 10 месяцев назад

Yeah it's kinda misleading but I forgot to mention the test scene was much much larger than what you see on screen, and therefore there are like 2K+ fog probes, which are also costly because scanning them is O(nBoids * nProbes)

@BlueOctopusDev 10 месяцев назад

bro got sponsored by unity :OO

@billal7185 9 месяцев назад

Thank you for the like on my other comment! I was trying to branch out more and was wondering if there was a version control platform I could follow you on. Fair enough if you aren't distributing your creations though.

@uselessgamedev 9 месяцев назад

Hi! If you're looking for the source code of the video projects, they're available on Patreon (link in the description). Otherwise I do have personal GitHub but there's basically nothing on it and it needs some cleaning up. It's mostly projects from a past life

@billal7185 9 месяцев назад

@@uselessgamedev totally understand, I honestly thought you were doing much better on youtube before I just looked now. Will consider when I can, that's an attractive offer

@CEOofGameDev 10 месяцев назад

Me and the boids at 3am looking for beans

@uselessgamedev 10 месяцев назад

Boids. Beans. Battlestar Galactica.

@torverngoldtwist5193 10 месяцев назад

FUCKYEAH FUCKING BOIDS IVE BEEN WAITING FOR THISSSS Youre awesome btw

@uselessgamedev 10 месяцев назад

Thanks! You're awesome too

@torverngoldtwist5193 10 месяцев назад

:O woh, hope youre having a good day, cant wait till you talk about character selection type data structures @@uselessgamedev

@uselessgamedev 10 месяцев назад

What do you mean? Always interested to learn about more data structures haha

@torverngoldtwist5193 10 месяцев назад

@@uselessgamedev like to choose different characters. Like on the hit game Hotline Miami. You can choose different characters, I asked some friends and they say its a data structure. But I can't find any tuts on it

@uselessgamedev 10 месяцев назад

I'll look into it thanks!

@TechJolt3d 10 месяцев назад

Its acerola yo

@jacobcowan3599 9 месяцев назад

Instead of using the position of colliders to apply a force, could you use their bounds to create unnavigable holes in your fog? Say the fog stored a number to represent strength, with zero meaning it's just been explored and positive values indicating spots worth exploring. Negative values could then be used to push the boids away from an area, so your physics call could find the fog probes that are within colliders, set them to negative, and thus let the boids avoid the whole bounds of the collider without needing to check the collider positions on the main thread. I have no idea if that would end up improving performance or not if you recalculate the fog in response to dynamic colliders, but if you're just worried about static obstacles, that could be computed once and let you keep all boid calculations parallelized-plus the benefit of full collider avoidance.

@uselessgamedev 9 месяцев назад

Yeah I guess that would work, it's basically baking the colliders into the fog "map", which would eliminate the physics rule (which is a good thing because it's the only one that's not threaded)

@revimfadli4666 10 месяцев назад

Me and the boids:

@user-gx8oe8zu4v 3 месяца назад

0:54 -1:06

@starplatinum3305 10 месяцев назад

can the octree or quadtree be infinite (or really big) ? like the outro scene, the limit range of boids are big af And can i make it for multiplayer (which means people can see the same boids)

@uselessgamedev 10 месяцев назад

I don't think there's a limit to how large they can be, especially since if a region isn't in use it won't be consuming resources. As for multiplayer, I guess it's technically feasible but you might have a hard time synchronizing every one

@starplatinum3305 10 месяцев назад

@@uselessgamedev thanks bro, can i ask some more ? - is a boid a gameObject ? Can i give them some collisions ? (Like, in ULTRAKILL when i shoot a fish (which is not a boid and just moving randomly), it dies (Destroy())) -if they have collisions can i optimize them ? Can they interact with other collisions ? Thanks, dont take this too seriously

@uselessgamedev 10 месяцев назад

Yes and yes, my boids are game objects with rigid bodies and colliders. Although it's not good for performance so I ended up disabling the physics at some point

@starplatinum3305 10 месяцев назад

@@uselessgamedev Thanks A Lot. You are an amazing person Unfortunately (im sorry), i still got some questions: -how can you turn off physics, bc i think they are moved by Rigidbody, so when u turn off physics, they will move by changing position over time ? (I think u meant u will turn off collisions ?) -Do you think using DOTS will optimise them ? Thanks again, you can answer anytime, dont take this too seriously

@uselessgamedev 10 месяцев назад

DOTS will definitely be more performant than GameObjects. By disabling physics I mean removing the collider and rigidbody components. The boids move forward by themselves

@amirhm6459 8 месяцев назад

so useless, love it!!

@DRE_WW 8 месяцев назад

Your Patreon isn’t accepting new members, any updates on that?

@uselessgamedev 8 месяцев назад

Yes, the one-month period ends on Oct. 14th, but iff I manage to publish the next video before then I'll unsuspend it when releasing the video Sorry for the inconvenience :(

@DRE_WW 8 месяцев назад

@@uselessgamedev as long as I ca subscribe in the future, thank you Your Moebius outline effect looks nice and I wanted to try it out

@liamlargo7481 10 месяцев назад

i didnt see the shell. i apologize for my past comments 🙏

@nicoleallain-launay9883 10 месяцев назад

Ca frise la poésie...

@user-gx8oe8zu4v 3 месяца назад

1:25 - 2:30

@unfilledflag 10 месяцев назад

You seem to have a bug, I suspect in the octree calculation or the grouping behavior has too strong a weight. If you look at the birds at the end they go to the corners and centers of a cube and group tightly. At 11:16 you can even see a perfect hexagon of birds: they're at the corners of the cube.

@uselessgamedev 10 месяцев назад

Yeah I guess I messed up on the separation weight when I was tweaking it

@colin_actually 10 месяцев назад

Now just take a few minutes to redo it in Unity's ECS and let's see the performance difference.

@uselessgamedev 10 месяцев назад

Yeah I think it would make a difference (and Unity's tech demo for DOTS has boids so). But if I was to remake this, I would directly make a compute shader (provided I didn't need the boids to interact with other stuff)

@julienmeunierwolfgunnm6536 10 месяцев назад

I can just the boys lol

@MartinDlabaja 9 месяцев назад

Boids are too "sticky", might look better implemented with "min distance" parameter.

@im-elie07 10 месяцев назад

New UselessGameDev vid just dropped :D

@kabinet0 10 месяцев назад

Wait a second. How did you get those pretty dropdowns and read only fields in the inspector seen at 10:29? That would be so useful to have. You should definitely learn compute shaders btw. (Trust Acerola if not me)

@uselessgamedev 10 месяцев назад

That's Odin Inspector. It's a must have if you're using Unity. It allows you to organize your fields (and properties!) with better drawers, groups, required fields, a bunch of things. But the main feature is the ability to add [Button] before a function to instantly create a button in the inspector that calls this function. No custom editor bs required. I can't think of a single other asset that boosted my productivity even half as much as Odin

@janus9148 7 месяцев назад

kinda like biomimicry 😅

@sheepcommander_ 9 месяцев назад

honestly the birds dont look that great, but I can get the concept and stuff

@LineOfThy 10 месяцев назад

booooooiiiiiiids

@gamedevreasearch 9 месяцев назад

Did you make this entire video just to say the word boid a thousand times?

@bagochips1208 9 месяцев назад

Unity sponser 💀

@ChristopherCricketWallace 10 месяцев назад

Not useless.

@Wolforce 9 месяцев назад

Now give the player a rifle =p

@SheepUndefined 9 месяцев назад

Okay, you call this useless, but the binary tree might be a good solution for what I'm doing rn.

@uselessgamedev 9 месяцев назад

Yeah quadtrees are life-saving. However they're not binary trees. If you specifically need a binary tree for some reason, check out kd-trees

@SheepUndefined 9 месяцев назад

@@uselessgamedev True. It's definitely a topic I'll have to look into a bit more to fully understand things. Thanks for the tip!

@AntonioNoack 9 месяцев назад

Your performance numbers are very weird, much lower than I'd expect :/. Computers are fast, and using my game engine, single threaded, n² complexity, I can get a boid-like simulation to run fine at 70 fps with 1000 boids (on a 5 year old processor, Ryzen 5 2600)

@uselessgamedev 9 месяцев назад

Yes, most of the cost in my simulation comes from the fog probes as it was tested on a much larger scene with 2000+ probes. I forgot to mention the test environment in the video, I guess it works from the clickbaity "wow we got from 15 boids to 1000 aMaZiNg omggg" point of view but it's not very telling the whole story

@ryanlockhart5328 10 месяцев назад

Birds aren't real.

@linkenparis9562 8 месяцев назад

please stop playing the whoosh sound when you make your character appear

@uselessgamedev 8 месяцев назад

Why don't you like the woosh noises?

@DasAntiNaziBroetchen 9 месяцев назад

You went with complex optimizations way before applying simpler optimizations. There's no reason why you couldn't do 1000 boids on a single core, if done properly. There may be some massive hidden Unity bottlenecks here. Your 15 boids running at 3 FPS isn't due to lack of acceleration structures and multithreading. I know nothing about Unity though, since I build engines for a living.

@uselessgamedev 9 месяцев назад

Yes that may be true. Also I forgot to mention it in the video but the test scene is much much larger than what you see on screen, and thus there are thousands of fog probes. That was a major issue