Random tween positioning (fish movement)

[swiftmend]

Hi,

 

I'm building a "pond" like top-down experience and have a fish animated fish I'd like to random move around in the pool (and then run away if you click near them)

 

was wondering how I could leverage tweenlite to have the fish randomly move around in the pond (without going outside of the pond itself).

 

Is there some type of random position tweens with random speed? Or a way of looping the controls infinitly?

 

Or if i could make a random tween and stick it in an enter_frame type control so it keeps running it over and over?

 

Thanks for the help!

[GreenSock]

Sure, you can just use an onComplete to call the same function over and over. Kinda like:

 

var xCenter:Number = 275;
var yCenter:Number = 200; 
var poolRadius:Number = 200;
function tweenFish():void {
   var angle:Number = Math.random() * Math.PI * 2; //random angle in radians
   var radius:Number = Math.random() * poolRadius;
   TweenLite.to(fish, 2, {x:Math.cos(angle) * radius + xCenter, y:Math.sin(angle) * radius + yCenter, ease:Quad.easeInOut, onComplete:tweenFish});
}
tweenFish();

 

You could get more fancy with using a bezier to add curved motion, etc. but hopefully this demonstrates the general concept.

 

Happy tweening.

[swiftmend]

Wow, this is working pretty good, I tried to swap it over to a bezier to make smoothly rotate towards the new location, but that doesn't seem to work, is there a quick way to mke him rotate the point he moves to before he moves to it? currently he just moves around without any rotation.

[GreenSock]

Did you try using orientToBezier? See the interactive demos in the Plugin Explorer. It's in the bezier and bezierThrough examples.

[swiftmend]

I tried this:

 

TweenMax.to(this, 2, {bezier:[{x:Math.cos(angle) * radius + xCenter, y:Math.sin(angle) * radius + yCenter}], orientToBezier:true, onComplete:tweenFish});

 

with no luck!

[GreenSock]

That's because your bezier only has one point which is the same as linear tween from the starting values to the ending values. You need to add more points to the bezier array

[swiftmend]

What would be the easiest way of doing this?

 

I was thinking that from within the function I could set a currentx and y position, then reset it after the tween was done but before the function is called again, and use that as the point of reference, but that would make it tween to its current spot (eg do nothing)

[GreenSock]

Are you asking how to add more points to your bezier?