Butterfly In The Sky [NOC]

APPLET | ZIP

For my midterm, I was inspired by the TV Show “Reading Rainbow”:

Butterfly in the sky
I can go twice as high
Take a look, it's in a book
Reading Rainbow

 
So I made a bunch of butterflies in the sky, in 3D, trying to make it look as if you’re looking up at the sky lying on a patch of grass. Maybe reading a book, or something. 

MATING : There are three kinds — Reds, Greens and Blues. And if they get near each other, they mate! And then their kids mate! And their kids’ kids mate! I’ve had it running for eight hours, and they just keep having babies. (Of course, I had some controls in place to make sure this tends to happen.)

OK, a few more points:

• I used Array Lists to birth and kill the butterflies, depending on their lifespan.
• I contained them in a loose boundary, by saying that if they’re beyond a certain area, they will move between random(-2,3) — so they have a tendency to move back, but they don’t always.
• For the three types of butterflies — plus their offspring — I extended one class for all of them.
• Wanna be the Steve Irwin of butterflies? Well you can stalk them! Using the A,Z and arrow keys, you can move the entire screen to look around and zoom in/out!

And the big finale:

KINECT: I hooked up my Kinect and made it so you can flap your wings and fly through the sky. Right now, it’s not super smooth. But you can flap up and sideways. (It’s hard to program a control method for all three directions, though. Working on it…)