Assignment 2 – OOP

Inspiration/Idea

I realized that the most challenging aspect of this assignment is not coding, but coming up with an idea for the assignment. For this assignment, I was inspired by the following sketch that the Professor made in class:

I intended to make “Replicating Balls”: every time the ball collides with the edge of the canvas, it would spawn a new ball that goes off in a random direction. Additionally, every ball would have an “energy” level, so that it cannot spawn balls infinitely. This energy level would be apparent by the transparency of the ball: the more transparent it is, the less energy it has, and eventually it cannot replicate.

Problems

I could have used this idea to illustrate in the simplest way how biological cells replicate. However, I ran into a problem that would not allow the replicated ball to have the same initial coordinates as the origin ball. This is because if the coordinates of the new ball were on the edge, it would infinitely spawn new balls causing the program to crash. This is why I ended up making the new balls spawn randomly across the canvas.

Implementation

I made a class Circ for every circle. The update() function update the position of every circle each time it is called and the replicate() function checks if the balls are in contact with the edges – a new ball is spawned randomly if there is such contact. Finally, the run() function calls both the update() and replicate() functions in the draw loop. I made an array of circles to contain every instance of the Circ object, and called the run() function for every circle in this array. I also randomly choose the colors for the balls. The background is a black rectangle with a high transparency so that the balls are seen leaving trails. The balls have high transparency to achieve the trail effect.  I increase the transparency of every ball every time it bounces off the edges until at one point, the transparency is so low that it cannot replicate any further (I do this using the if statements in the replicate() function). Here is the sketch and the code: