Boids Aquarium

Load a saved settings file (from 💾) into a pad with 📂, then click the pad — even while recording a composition — to snap the whole dashboard, and the tank, to that scene. Right-click a pad to clear it.

A self-contained performer that eases the controls over time so the society composes itself — no internet, works offline. It drives the sliders through the same events the recorder captures, so you can ● record its performance and 📦 export it. Built for the flock world; it touches the simulation sliders and the whole mixer — including the lead, the canon, their octaves and the tempo, so each movement scores its own melody — but never the top-row buttons. No two readings of a movement are alike, and a long performance builds: scenes open restrained and grow bolder over the first nine minutes. Zen is the exception — it holds the tank near-still, floating at the lowest speeds with the thermal mixing off, and takes minutes to move anything.

Locked holds every boid within ±spread of your hue — seeding, immigration and every birth. Shades come from the spread plus each boid's own saturation. Note the sound's colour chord assigns one instrument per hue family, so a narrow lock settles it onto a single sustained voice instead of a shifting chord.

Once every boid wears an uploaded image, the predator turns invisible — it still hunts and kills, but its teardrop body, fins, trail and eyes are not drawn, since they belong to a different picture. You hear it instead: the menace ostinato and the kill snare carry on.

— rippling of the background image —

The default boid: its shape, and how any image is fitted to a boid.

Boids that wear your own pictures.

The ↑ rows are unique: one boid wears each at a time, released when its wearer dies and picked up by the next boid to look. They are claimed ahead of ordinary images. Once any ↑ image is loaded, boids with nothing to wear are not drawn at all — so an ↑-only pool shows just these images, while uploading ordinary images alongside clothes everyone again. Boid ripple waves ↑ images always, and ordinary images too whenever the Upright switch is on — one mesh each, so keep the population small.

— rippling of boid images (upright uploaded images only) —

Ready-made koi pond and reef tank (3D fish), and how fish swim.

— bubbles (fish tanks) —

— barracuda (fish tanks, 3D on) —

— eagle ray (fish tanks, 3D on) —

— sea turtle (fish tanks, 3D on) —

— day and night (fish tanks) —

— swimming (side view and 3D; also for your own images, not the ↑ upright ones) —

— microphone (Pi: its mic server · Mac: mock_mic.py) —