FAME, soft flock formation control for collective behavior studies and rapid games development

• Main Authors: HO, Choon Sing, ONG, Yew-Soon, CHEN, Xianshun, TAN, Ah-hwee
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2012
• Subjects: soft formation; flock; behavioral animation; collective behavior; games; Programming Languages and Compilers; Software Engineering
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/6720; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/7723/viewcontent/FAME___SEAL_2012.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

We present FAME, a comprehensive C# software library package providing soft formation control for large flocks of agents. While many existing available libraries provide means to create flocks of agent equipped with simple steering behavior, none so far, to the best of our knowledge, provides an easy and hassle free approach to control the formation of the flock. Here, besides the basic flocking mechanisms, FAME provides an extensive range of advanced features that gives enhanced soft formation control over multiple flocks. These soft formation features include defining flocks in any user-defined formation, automated self-organizing agent within formation, manipulating formation shape at real-time and bending the formation shape naturally along the curvature of the path. FAME thus not only supports the research studies of collective intelligence and behaviors, it is useful for rapid development of digital games. Particularly, the development cost and time pertaining to the creation of multi-agent group formation can be significantly reduced.