Ecosystem

The first week of the project was slow for me creatively. I needed to get to know Vectors in p5 before I could really conceptualize any interesting systems, but with my non-coding workload that was a bit hard to do.

Current Sketch, I was trying to make a kind of horde chasing horde simulator, but this still needs work and I am not married to it conceptually.

Week Two I began work on a new kind of ecosystem, I wanted to create a constant graphic generator that has basic “nature-like” rules to encourage change over time. Here’s the basic idea:

Images of places and objects will be used to create a makeshift background that moves in a constant direction, Ideally as the background stops filling the whole canvas other images will attach to this object to create a kind of moving quilt/collage background.

On top of the background will be other images which include faces and animals.

Animals experience regular gravity, they walk across the bottom of the screen occasionally jumping and falling back down to “earth”.

Faces are flying objects and they are randomly generated at a fixed interval, each time they are generated they have a random size, and their movement will respond to the size of nearby faces. Small faces run from big ones, and if big ones catch up, they consume the smaller ones and grow a bit. Eventually larger faces reach a fixed size that is “too big” and they explode into 20 smaller versions of themselves and fall off the bottom of the canvas.

Finally, words act erratically, moving around with randomness, but whenever they bump into other words, they join together to make non-sense sentence. At a certain sentence length, they are also deemed to be too big for the carrying capacity of the ecosystem and fall of the bottom of the canvas.

March 17th, I’ve worked on the project and made a few changes to my original concept but the picture is still the same. Main elements include a moving background that is made up of random images from the things array. My chasers are Faces and they prey on each other until they blow up from over-predation. The words are a little funny and hard to read, so will continue to refine how they appear, but they move randomly, join together and at a sentence length of four move off of the screen. I use a force like opposite gravity for this movement, and gravity for the circles that face explosion creates, there is also attraction between predator and prey.

The current version of the code lives on my cowTools.art website at cowTools.art/p5/eco