boids4R, Deterministic Reynolds-style boids and swarm simulations

Frédéric Bertrand

boids4R provides deterministic Reynolds-style boids and swarm simulations for R. It owns simulation semantics only: agents, rules, obstacles, attractors, predators, species, and frame export. Rendering packages consume the exported frames through optional adapters.

The package is intended to pair cleanly with browser-native renderers such as ggWebGL, without putting camera, shader, widget, or scene fields into the core simulation objects.

Example

library(boids4R)

sim <- boids_scenario("murmuration_3d", n = 400, seed = 1)
frames <- as.data.frame(sim)
head(frames)

if (requireNamespace("ggWebGL", quietly = TRUE)) {
  ggWebGL::ggWebGL(as_ggwebgl_spec(sim), height = 520)
}

References

The model follows the standard boids lineage introduced by Craig Reynolds: separation, alignment, and cohesion rules produce flocking behavior through local agent interactions.

• Reynolds, C. W. (1987). Flocks, herds and schools: A distributed behavioral model. ACM SIGGRAPH.
• Craig Reynolds boids page: https://www.red3d.com/cwr/boids/