The mean velocity is the desired velocity directly — not renormalized to
maxSpeed, because a flock cruising at half speed should not be accelerated
to full speed by alignment alone. It is clamped to maxSpeed, so an agent
is never asked for a velocity it cannot hold. With no neighbours the result is
the zero vector (see separation on abstention).
Applied on its own from rest, alignment drives the agent's velocity to the
mean exponentially with a one second time constant (the implicit gain noted at
the top of this module), and once matched it produces exactly zero.
Alignment (§12 flocking): match the neighbours' mean velocity.
The mean velocity is the desired velocity directly — not renormalized to
maxSpeed, because a flock cruising at half speed should not be accelerated to full speed by alignment alone. It is clamped tomaxSpeed, so an agent is never asked for a velocity it cannot hold. With no neighbours the result is the zero vector (see separation on abstention).Applied on its own from rest, alignment drives the agent's velocity to the mean exponentially with a one second time constant (the implicit gain noted at the top of this module), and once matched it produces exactly zero.