On Thursday Simon was busy with writing his own code in Java. He called it “Path Following”. The project basically involved simulating different phenomena with a physics particle (having it follow a path, fall and bounce).
The most interesting part of this challenge Simon invented for himself was applying restitution to make the particle bounce in a realistic way (Simon failed several times but eventually succeeded). “If a bound hits the physics particle I’m going to multiply the physics particle’s velocity by -0.8 (0.8 is the arbitrary restitution, so I multiply the velocity by the negative restitution)”, Simon explained.
He also planned to incorporate collision detection in this project but didn’t succeed.
Here the particle is drawing a graph (“noise without a noise function”):
Here Simon adds one more particle and is trying to create collision detection and make the particles restitute:
Debugging and using inheritance for the second particle:
Making the particle remember the graph:
Applying gravity to the physics particle:
Trying to make the physics particle bounce (apply restitution). In this video Simon doesn’t succeed.
Simon manages to control the particle’s bounce (with the mouse) but there’s still no restitution:
In the following video Simon finally won: he figured out how to apply restitution to the bouncing particle making it look like a bouncing ball. After a few bounces however, the particle collapsed (Simon solved the collapsing problem later on: in his code, the < and > should be <= and >=).
In a steering behavior variation, trying to teach a particle to follow a given path (road). Simon hoped to apply a genetic algorithm here but got stuck:
Geeks out of the box 