By the way, do you have any examples of a flock using this cloned position technique?

Also, any of guys proficient in Unity or Java want to have a bash at outperforming my humble Flash Flock?

If you show me where you got the algorithm from I'll give a try at 100k entities.

Also, graphics is not the problem, the algorithm is n^2, so rendering performance is secondary.

I made the algorithm myself, it took quite a lot of work to get it running this fast, with proper Flock behaviour.

And yep, that's the point - the main challenge is to make a really fast algorithm

There are plenty of boids algorithms available of course, the trick it to get the behaviour looking nice AND running fast.

I'd be very impressed if you got 100k even in Unity or Java on the web. I wouldn't be surprised with that number running directly in Windows, but in a browser that number would be hard to achieve at an acceptable framerate.

Obviously on a GPU platform, the pixels being rendered are going to be practically free (where as on my platform, they use like 75% of the avaialable power). So the trick is to develop some really fast flock code and object handling.

I can't seem to find my old projects. I haven't touched flocking in a few years, but I might have to give a little java applet a go. (I haven't written one of those since first year of university.)

I'll be interested to see how easily my performance is matched with more powerful platforms like Java.

I've pushed AS3 for all it's worth and got the best performance possible, but it's still a very low powered platform, with no GPU access in FP10.

Although not as fast as native windows apps, Unity and Java are significantly more powerful than Flash in the realm of browser based platforms. Largely thanks to GPU access, but I'm pretty sure code runs significantly quicker on both of them, especially for data access.

What are you using to render that? I know flash 10 but I was not aware it supported 3D rendering?

It doesn't natively, you have to do it yourself.

I made my own 3D engine in AS3, which by Flash standards, runs extremely fast.

SteveDeFacto if you want to see 3d in the browser see my latest game

vampire balls
it does flocking as well (though I think theres only 11 balls)

PS - nice one rumblesushi