To do a netlogo model with several patch layers (think floors of a building) do I need to go to Netlogo 3D? - netlogo

Question

I have a netlogo application in mind which involves multiple non interacting layers. Think floors of a building. Would I need to go to netlogo 3D or is there a suggested way to handle in regular netlogo?

Answer 1

This was an interesting enough question that I decided to make a simple sample.
The method I use is to have a global variable to track the number-of-floors we'll have in our building, as well as the active-floor that we are currently working with. Then all our agents, walls and workers, have a floor-num that tracks which they are on. We have a set-active-floor procedure that handles switching our currently active floor that we want to see and work with, making the patches a certain color (active-color) if they have a wall agent present and swapping which workers are hidden?. In this way, most of the magic happens in the setup-floor and set-active-floor procedures, and the real work of our model in go can be pretty typical NetLogo code asking the active-workers to do whatever we want.
While the model is running you can call set-active-floor n to any value 0 to 4 to change the current workers and walls. I also included a show-all procedure that'll un-hide all the walls and workers and let you see where they are at; you'll need to run that with the model stopped.
globals [colors active-color number-of-floors active-floor]
turtles-own [floor-num]
breed [walls wall]
breed [workers worker]
to setup
clear-all
set colors (list red blue green orange violet)
set number-of-floors 5
foreach (range 0 number-of-floors) setup-floor
reset-ticks
set-active-floor 0
end
to setup-floor [num]
set active-floor num
set active-color (item num colors)
ask patches [ set pcolor black ]
; make some random walls
create-walls (count patches * 0.2) [
set floor-num num
set hidden? true
set size 0.5
setxy random-pxcor random-pycor
set pcolor active-color
]
; only one wall per patch
ask patches [
let patch-walls floor-walls-here
let wall-count count patch-walls
if (wall-count > 1) [
ask n-of (wall-count - 1) patch-walls [ die ]
]
]
; make some workes
create-workers 10 [
set floor-num num
set hidden? true
set shape "person"
set color active-color - 2
move-to one-of patches with [pcolor != active-color]
]
end
to go
; this only "runs" the active floor, but you could run all of them
; using the same `foreach (range 0 number-of-floors) ...` code as
; in the `setup` procedure.
set-active-floor active-floor
ask active-workers [
; this code can be about the same as you'd write in a normal model...
move-to one-of patches with [pcolor != active-color]
]
tick
end
to set-active-floor [num]
set active-floor num
set active-color (item num colors)
; after the `pcolor` is set, we can use that to determine if a wall
; exists or not for an `active-worker`, we don't have to check the
; floor number at all while we do our work.
ask walls [ set hidden? true ]
ask patches [
set pcolor ifelse-value no-walls-here [ black ] [ active-color ]
]
ask workers [
set hidden? floor-num != active-floor
]
end
to-report active-workers
report workers with [floor-num = active-floor]
end
to-report floor-walls-here
report walls-here with [floor-num = active-floor]
end
to-report no-walls-here
report (count floor-walls-here = 0)
end
to show-all
foreach (range 0 number-of-floors) [ num ->
ask patches [
set pcolor ifelse-value any? walls-here [ red - 3 ] [ black ]
]
ask turtles with [floor-num = num] [
set color item num colors
set hidden? false
]
]
end
Finally, if things got much more complicated than this, I would probably choose to move to NetLogo 3D instead.