Hey

I made a sketch where particles within a certain distance of a "destination" point will be attracted to it, and any particles in view of those will follow them, and so on.

There are a few main variables at the top that can be changed, in these demos the particles stay in fairly tight paths but they can more organic and swarm-like with some tweaking.

It was meant to be done with many more thousand particles and saved out to a video, but i toned it down a little and commented out the video code, which can still be enabled. If it interests you in the least I'd highly suggest running it locally to use the video library and more particles.

There is a 2d and a 3d variation.
http://openprocessing.org/visuals/?visualID=987

http://openprocessing.org/visuals/?visualID=988

There is also a video of some hour or so long renders with more particles of both, at:

http://www.vimeo.com/3116307

http://www.vimeo.com/3116474

aww, i had commented out code in there to do exactly that but i took it out! It divided the the green value the lines have by the number of hops from the particle to the destination. it was cool but the brightness dropped off a little quickly.

I'm going to try it out again but use HSB color mode or something to give it some better hues (like Giovanni did at http://openprocessing.org/visuals/?visualID=765), and make the particles slowly raise their color value the longer they're in a chain so that the more solid, long lasting chains will show up the most. Particles will lose their color value quickly but not too quickly so that particles spending 50% of their time in a chain will still show up.

In the end though I'm hoping to make a program to play mp3's and save out the information to a file so I can do non-realtime renders where things react to music. Maybe make particles without a target get pushed away from the sphere in the center to the beat, causing them to blow around like leaves in the wind and latch on to chains.

I don't know. There's too many things to do in processing.