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ants devlog 4: what if an ant could sense when food's nearby?

wait, let’s make use of the tools given to us by default: here’s the commit for this post’s code, on Github

had i thought on this far enough ahead, perhaps we’d have had a PR with many commits, one for each change, but in that idea’s place let’s follow a simple three act structure (out of 5, as you will see very soon our work ends with a large and tragic turn)

act i: setting the scene

before anything else, let’s simplify the vars we use in our ant_move() code: previously, we referenced our current ant’s x and y via their object, but if we want to reference them more often in our movement function, as we plan to, it makes more sense to simplify those to just x and y. after all, its what we’ll mean in this the most

any other code in this area is replacing these vars throughout

act 2: a tired joke about not wanting to remove bugs

this ones simple, and well worth taking note of. in our _init() we added a new variable debug_text, set to a blank string, and we end our _draw() with a call to print this variable to the screen (at the end, so we know it’s always on top of everything). at the moment, we don’t add anything to this string, as we’ve more or less cleaned thing up, but a simple call of debug_text = debug_text .. "whatever we wanna check on" keeps our business on the screen. very nice

also: could we loop thru an array of strings to make this easier to add to? who cares! we can still do anything we want to later!

act three: the actual changes we’ve made

notice!

this is wrong. this is very wrong. the sensing function we make is incredibly functional, but the way we choose to use it is very wrong. we just gotta pretend it isn’t for a bit of narrative. spoiler, howver, this will end up bad

should be simple, right? we have a randomized movement function, let’s slot in some new movement types. under our list of movement options, let’s add an elseif and add in a new function for looking nearby

find_nearby_dots

^^ see that up there, that’s what we’ll be calling our sensing function. interested and detail-oriented readers (of whom, at the time of writing, i have none) will notice this is not in the linked commit. that’s cause i messed up rebasing. i have no desire to fix this, so it stands

that said, we can add the function in whole here now:

function find_nearby_dots(x,y,dist)
   local vals={}

   for i=0,dist-1 do
      local x1,x2=x+dist-i,x-dist+i
      local y1,y2=y+i,y-i

      if(0==i) then
         add(vals, {x1,y1})
         add(vals, {x2,y1})
         add(vals, {y2,x1})
         add(vals, {y2,x2})
      else
         add(vals, {x1,y1})
         add(vals, {x2,y1})
         add(vals, {x1,y2})
         add(vals, {x2,y2})
      end
   end

   return vals
end

isn’t plaintext wonderful! the above is essentially nonsense requiring a day or two of doing math (i have an MFA in creative writing), graph paper, highlighters, coordinate writing, refusing to look up answers because I’m doing this to keep my own creative forces occupied, not to make the most technically proper game. i will not be adding these notes to the page as ive moved apartment recently and dont wanna hafta get me scanner out. in place, let’s just explain the finished process:

in essense, thru guess-and-check i determined that for each new pixel of distance an ant is able to sense, another four pixels need to be sensed around it. i dont wanna go into the formula because i wrote it about a week ago and have since forgot it, but suffice it to say in the local variable lines at the top of the for loop we add or subtract a specific amount from the passed distance to create four new points of ‘vision’. they mirror each other quite well, so we can add them with only a few calculations. as you can see as well, the first loop works a little different in how its mirrored (not how our x and y variables are altered by the loop number: this is what causes this), so we get our points of vision differently

each of these points is added to an array, which is then returned: this is an array of all our senses points

math-brained types might notice this only gives us our outer ring of vision. yep: this only returns our outer ring. this is on purpose, as it adds a bit more flexability: we can use the function to determine what pixels are a certain distance of steps away with this one function or, by calling the function from within a loop, determine all the pixels that distance or less. i like that

(for the moment, imagining myself saving memory wheter I am or not, i’m only looking at the outer ring in code later. but, as shown above, it’s an easy change if i’m incorrect)

(also, not how easily this could be re-written to not need an x and y variable: we could simply return a distance amount rather than an absolute pixel. oh well, i realized that when writing this up. maybe, if it ends up convenient, we’ll change that later)

using find_nearby_dots

in this first paragraph here i’m insulting myself a week or so ago for not understanding how my earlier movement system worked. to skip ahead to the explanation, i was not balancing movement well. i was forgetting that my previous randomization took the option of no movement into account to create more jagged, natural seeming motions. this means that while there’s still only about a two percent chance to move each cardinal direction, there’s now a 92% chance to move toward a sensed food pixel, and no chance to stay put. this means that every frame, of which there are 60 in a second, our ants will move. that’s stupid fast, in practice

back to our ant movement functions, surely we can just slot this into our movement functions, right?? surely this is simple. see line 105 in the github, see our local variable to hold these produced sensed squares, scent_squares. we’ve simply added another branch to our movement if statement, which is surely going to add a “more likely” movement choice, in comparison to our 2% chance movements from before

we use our loop pixels function to loop thru the sensed pixels we’ve gathered and check: is it food? if so, we move towards it, prefering vertical movement over horizontal for the sole reason that i use the computer on my phone a lot, so i imagine computer screens as intrinsically tall.

by the way, does this function move us multiple times each way as written? i think so. i haven’t tested this out visually for reasons we’ll explore below

stop fucking around, show me why this sucks

see that? we move too many times per second. its one thing to swarm. this is something else

for next time, we’ll look into refactoring our movement decision code, so we can fix this

i dont wanna talk about anything (2025-27 weekly post)

finished my draft of “The Girl”. swear I’ll look for publishers soon. its a bit of a weird one, low on the ‘sellability’ deal, so i’ll likely be looking for publishers myself, seeing if there’s a horror/weird fic place who might want it. at this point (less than a week from revising), i think its nice. there is a place for it

didnt post my flash last week, i forgot. that just means i get another chance to revise it for this week. ha ha ha ha ha

do you see circling thru (2025-26 weekly post)

this week i finally got back to some consistant working on this most recent The Girl revision. lines 3311 to 4543, for those of you who have my markdown file. this is where we got switched the most, from one sort of dissipation to another, a more explicit embrace of themes of war. really im just happy with it cause it has two of my favorite short stories tucked within

also finished a draft of We Mimes in japanese. no clue what to do with that now, as im certain its full of grammatic errors and nonsense, but i dont know if i care enough to pursue proofreading to fix this. where is the line between my silly translation being public and private, so to speak

and i also did a flash again. be looking out here thursday, ill put it up maybe

anonymous (2025-25 weekly post)

this week i wrote:

• pico 8 post, unfinished, as my technical knowledge is low
• meet me in a dream translation of asparagus, available on this very website now!
• large portions of revision for my difficult novel “the girl”, a sustained section of “normal” dissociations, interupted by relevant anxiety attack

you may notice, constant reader, i posted no weekly flash: this was for anxiety reasons also. i am past my state of panic, but my foreced productivity was altered. as they say: oh well

Asparagus, by Haruki Murakami

my translation of the third story of 夢で会いましょう [Meet Me in a Dream] by Haruki Murakami and Shigesato Itoi, not guaranteed to be accurate. see the intro post to read more!

Of all places on earth, we got lost in a field of asparagus. Our plan was to reach our village early that morning, but by the time we understood we were stuck in the vast asparagus the sun was sinking in the west. The passing wind carried a chill, along with the ominous scent of the asparagus.

In attempt to find our time and place I pulled a map out from my bag, but I learned nothing. No asparagus farm was listed there.

— What’s the point? I said. Even if we knew the way home, we’d never reach it.

My younger brother was lighter than me, so he climbed a tree that rose from the asparagus. He clung to its trunk with one hand, just like a monkey, and squinted into the distant horizon.

— I don’t get it, I can’t see nothing, he said. Not even lights.

— How’s that possible? my younger sister asked, tears in her eyes.

— It’s ok, don’t worry at all, I said. You all gather firewood for the night. I’ll see if I can dig us up a ditch, find some ground water.

As instructed, my siblings worked to gather sticks of dried asparagus, covering their mouths to prevent breathing its overpowering vapors. Meanwhile with a short shovel I started on my ditch. A dry, meter-deep ditch: it was hardly enought to be called a placebo, but what else did I have? Anything to soothe my frightened siblings.

The moon by now had risen in the sky, its light dyeing the mists that rose above the asparagus blue. Scattered birds now fell to the ground, began to flap their wings in terror. Soon—once the moon was all the way above us—they would be caught up in the roots of the asparagus. To think: a full moon on this of any night.

— Crouch your bodies low everyone, I said. Make sure your head’s under their gas. Don’t fall asleep. As soon as you fall asleep, the vines will grab you.

The longest night of our lives had just begun.