Going in Circles

You have played around with the intended heading of your boids, and noticed how they changed course. Let's try to make your boids go in circles, by changing intended heading periodically.

So we want to change the heading of the boid slightly each time the brain server is requested to provide an intent. We can use the boid parameter that is passed to our function for that.

We first introduce a variable that we can easily change called delta that will represent the amount of change in heading. Next we will set the intended heading to the boids current heading with the sleight alteration.

delta := 1
{
    "heading": boid.heading + delta,
    "speed": 0.005
}

Experimentation

Change the value of delta and see what happens. What do you notice? Even with very large values of delta, the boids do not make tighter circles.

The reason for this is that the boids agility prevents them from instantly changing heading. So ultimatly the are limited by how dexterous the boids are.