by Grant Skinner

Wander Motion Class

I recently put together a simple class for managing “wandering” motion in AS3, and thought I would share it. It’s a pretty flexible class, with a lot of different options:


  • specify speed
  • x, y, and rotation targets
  • specify constant trend strength to move towards the target.
  • specify a count and a delayCount to have the trend strength increase over time.
  • outer radius specifies the maximum distance from the x/y target the object can move
  • inner radius specifies when the trend starts (ie. within inner radius, outer radius has no effect)
  • control randomness with varySpeed and varyRotation
  • onChange and onComplete callbacks


Here’s a demo you can use to play with the different settings:


I’ve also been playing around with it to make large generative outputs. Nothing really exciting yet, but it’s fun: image1, image2.

You can grab the Wander class and a simple demo by clicking here. Beware though, you can waste a lot of time tweaking values and watching the results.

Grant Skinner

The "g" in gskinner. Also the "skinner".

@gskinner

If you enjoyed this, you might like these articles…

Wander Motion Class Update, AS3 Kaleidoscope Class, Ultra Simple Output Class, Source Code: Random Methods Utility Class

8 Comments

  1. Max November 5, 2009 at 9:33pm

    Pretty cool. 🙂

    Could it be easily adapted to one of the 3d engines such as away3d, pv3d, sandy etc?

  2. Juwal Bose November 5, 2009 at 10:34pm

    I am not seeing the embedded swf properly. I have the debug player on firefox on mac. It throws lots of errors. The downloaded ones work just fine. Simply excellent.

  3. Lee Probert November 6, 2009 at 2:31am

    Hey Max, I was going to ask the same thing. I’ve looked into this and it’s not that straight forward to do this in 3D. You can’t just use SIN and COS on the Z as well as the X & Y. I’d love to know what Math is required to create an orbit in 3D.

  4. Milan Orszagh November 6, 2009 at 3:01am

    Nice job Grant, was just about to do smth like this for myself, but might as well play with your class now 🙂

  5. Tahir Ahmed November 6, 2009 at 3:12am

    Nice, very nice. Thanks for sharing.

  6. Keith H November 6, 2009 at 12:03pm

    I imagine this is how particles orbit kind of on quantum level.

  7. the a la menthe  November 11, 2009 at 2:31am

    Hello

    This is very good post and you have done a great job.I must say that you are very talented.I have checked those both images which you have given and I like it.I can see that demo too.

  8. Makram Saleh November 30, 2009 at 1:16am

    Hey Guys,

    I wanted to use this class in an AS2 project, so I just ported the code (and test file).

    You can download the files from here: http://qbesq.com/shared/Wander-AS2.zip

    Hope you find it useful.

Comments are closed.