Simple Gatherers simulation in Rust, using Bevy. Port of the Breve Gatherers original.

• https://an.org/gatherers/

The white boxes, 'ants', follow most simple rules, and don't know anything about each other:

• go straight in random direction
• if encounter food, pick it up, and turn back to a random direction
• if encounter food, but is already carrying one, drop the food, and turn back

This results in the food getting gathered in piles, maybe eventually in a single pile, even though the gatherers don't know anything about each other, nor have such a goal really written explicitly. This is a simple emergent phenomenon.

Is a loose port of the original Gatherers demo made in Breve, back in 2002 or so. The original code is in: https://github.com/jonklein/breve/blob/master/demos/Gatherers.tz

Made using the Bevy game engine for Rust, reusing the wrap-around system and other lessons from the Asteroids clone Bevydroids. Thanks!

cargo run

trunk serve

trunk build --release

For detailed build instructions, troubleshooting, and deployment options, see BUILDING.md.

• Basic behaviour from the original Breve Gatherers working
• UI Speed control slider:
  • need to set the speed to a var & the pick-up cooldown to be calculated from the speed sensibly
• Respond to windows size change in the browser, and make full browser window sized.
  • Works on the desktop already, just needs the browser hooks
• Optimize and improve collision detection
  • (maybe using continuous collision detection which would be a nice fit with the linear movements here)
  • (perhaps use https://github.com/SergiusIW/collider-rs or https://github.com/patrik-cihal/perfect-collisions )
  • DONE: there'sa simple SpatialIndex in the Observers example, https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/blob/latest/examples/ecs/observers.rs#L196
• Add sounds to events, food pickup & drop
  • would be cool to have these parametric so that the amount of food nearby affects the sound
• Maybe add colours to the food to mark some info, like time since last pick-up, the direction from where it arrived to the current drop spot, what else? https://bevyengine.org/examples-webgpu/2d-rendering/mesh2d-vertex-color-texture/