5-15-2005 More on Fish

With Lee's new graphics, I have put together a new fish scene. For the orange fish, I beefed up the manipulation force and inverted the action, so that the fish are attracted to the mouse. They swim toward the cursor, swim in ellipses around it, and leave at tangents - this is an emergent behavior in the movement algorithm that looked kind of neat during testing. Having them lock onto the cursor was just kind of boring. The smaller purple fish flee the cursor as before.

5-15-2005

It's all pretty much working now. We swapped out Lee's G5 tower for a Dell D600 laptop, giving us a massive improvement in performance. In the heaviest scenes, I estimate that the latency is down to about a quarter of a second. Foggy windows, Tinkertoys, and Fish all work very well, and JJ's scary blob transition scene has a very different character.

Working on a few things still. Tinkertoys has a problem where any background layers are being drawn on top of the layer that the drawing API works on. I'll need to look into that more. Lee put up some new fish graphics, and I'm working on some new code for this new species of fish that will have them moving a bit differently.

Incidentally, I added code to all of the fish that has them react when they are directly touched. It's based on a hitTest method, and alters the fish's destination point as if the user had touched that instead. The old movement method is still in there, so fish will tend (though not always) to steer around the user, but they will also try to swim away very fast when they are touched. I think this provides the kind of immediate feedback that tells users that they are indeed manipulating the fish.