Contextual Color Shaders about boids HOT 1 OPEN

There's potential for me to create shader-like behavior without relying on actual Shaders, but I'll need to do experiments. I'm going to start calling these shaders 'heatmaps', even if technically they aren't heatmaps specifically. But the effect I want from both is the same: the visualized density of a certain phenomenon within a certain area.

Some other ideas:

• Infection Heatmap
  • A topical heatmap that may work with the Separation rule to identication what Boids have 'touched' a specific Boid, simulating a infection of sorts. I should look up COVID-19 simulations, infection logic and such.
• Flock Heatmap
  • A heatmap that colors specific flocks based on proximity. This is most likely a very difficult heatmap, and likely won't be performant without some kind of extremely fast flock identification algorithm.
• Velocity Magnitude Heatmap
  • A heatmap that colors Boids based on their speed (not velocity, which is a signed vector!). This speed could be calculated based on the Velocity's absolute magnitude.

from boids.