Picking up food object in radius

Question

I'm making a Genetic Algorithm for a school project. Currently I'm building the foundation for the "dot" objects that move around and pick up food. I wrote some code that I thought should be able to do that and after some trial and error I came up with this. ( It's probably not the cleanest code and I would love to hear some tips about that as well). The only problem with the code is that the object does not just pick up 1 food but multiple and I don't know why.

I've tried putting the food objects index in a seperate Array so I can later remove it from the food Array (when I know the index to remove >> targetIndex)

checkForTarget() {
    let inRange = new Array();
    let indexArray = new Array();
    for (let i = 0; i < food.length; i++) {
        let d = dist(food[i].pos.x, food[i].pos.y, this.pos.x, this.pos.y);
        if (d < this.sense) {
            inRange.push(food[i]);
            indexArray.push(i);
        }
    }

    if (!inRange.length == 0) {
        let closest = this.sense; // this.sense = radius
        let target, targetIndex;

        for (let i = 0; i < inRange.length; i++) {
            let d = dist(inRange[i].pos.x, inRange[i].pos.y, this.pos.x, this.pos.y);
            if (d < closest) {
                target = inRange[i];
                targetIndex = indexArray[i];
                closest = d;
            }
        }

        let targetpos = createVector(target.pos.x, target.pos.y); //fixed food removing from function (resetting position by using sub)
        let desired = targetpos.sub(this.pos);
        desired.normalize();
        desired.mult(this.maxspeed);
        let steeringForce = desired.sub(this.vel);
        this.applyForce(steeringForce);

        for (let i = 0; i < food.length; i++) {
            let d = dist(target.pos.x, target.pos.y, this.pos.x, this.pos.y);
            if (d < this.size) {
                console.log(targetIndex);
                this.food_eaten += 1;
                food.splice(targetIndex, 1);
            }
        } 
    }
}

I don't get any error messages with this code, I used console.log to log the targetIndex. Which results in getting the same output multiple times.

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 02 '19 at 07:24

[...] the object does not just pick up 1 food but multiple [...]

Of course it does, becaus in

for (let i = 0; i < food.length; i++) {
   let d = dist(target.pos.x, target.pos.y, this.pos.x, this.pos.y);
   if (d < this.size) {
       // [...]
   }
}

The condition d < this.size does not depend on food[i], if the condition is fulfilled it accepts each food in the array.

Just skip the for loop, to solve the issue. Note, you want to "eat" one food, so it is sufficient to verify if 1 food is in range. The index of the food is already identified and stored in targetIndex:

//for (let i = 0; i < food.length; i++) {

let d = dist(target.pos.x, target.pos.y, this.pos.x, this.pos.y);
if (d < this.size) {
    console.log(targetIndex);
    this.food_eaten += 1;
    food.splice(targetIndex, 1);
}

//}

Picking up food object in radius

1 Answers1