Scratch

You could work the project backwards:  Let's say you have a bunch of Target sprites and one Hero sprite.  Each Target sprite could compute the distance to the Hero sprite (when requested by a broadcast message) and, if it is smaller than a global variable called Distance, replace that value with a new shortest distance.  The target sprite could also update a couple of location variables X_Closest and Y_Closest at the same time.  Then, whenever the Hero wanted to know which Target was closest, it would simply send out a message and then head towards X_Closest,Y_Closest.    Would that work for what you are trying to do?

chalkmarrow wrote:

Paddle2See beat me to it. I think his idea is exactly the way I would do it. I was considering doing a simulation once of group behavior of birds (google "Boids" for a good example) and I think that's the way I started to do it.

I've been thinking about Boids for quite awhile!  Flocking behavior and all that...it would be cool.  I haven't made any real progress on it though.  Probably shouldn't be hijacking this thread...

s_federici wrote:

I think that a very nice possibility that should seriously considered to be added to Scratch is a "duplicate" command that would allow a sprite to duplicate itself. But allowing this, a sprite cannot know in advance the names of all other spirtes. What do you think?

Or also a "duplicate sprite #..." (i.e. the duplication of a given sprite performed by another sprite) could be a nice addition. Even if you could always send a message to the "duplicable" sprite that would decide by itself if it would like to be duplicated. This would make object-orientation safer, I guess.