Chapter 2. Introduction to breve
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## Chapter 2. Introduction to breve

breve is a free environment designed for simulation of realistic, 3D, multi-agent systems.

This document describes breve and outlines how simulations are constructed. This chapter contains a brief overview on how to get started using breve to run simulations and how to get started on constructing your own.

## What is breve?

breve is a free simulation environment designed for multi-agent simulation. breve allows users to define the behaviors of autonomous agents in a continuous 3D world, then observe how they interact. breve includes support for a rich visualization engine, realistic physical simulation and an easy-to-use scripting language.

Starting in breve 2.6, breve simulations can be written in breve's custom the section called “Writing breve Simulations With "steve"” language, or with the popular open-source the section called “Writing breve Simulations With Python” language. Both of these languages, along with their strengths and weaknesses are described later in this documentation.

breve can be used as a tool to explore any type of simulated world. breve has been used for a wide variety of simulation applications: simulated virtual creatures, artificial ecosystems, simulations of molecular biology, visualization and much more. breve facilitates the construction of complex agent-based simulations by automatically handling agent communication, representation in 3D space, graphical rendering, physical simulation and a number of other features which are useful to agent-based simulations.

### Multi-Agent Simulation

The term agent refers to any object in a simulated world, but in particular, an object with autonomous behaviors which interacts with its environment and other agents. A multi-agent simulation is a simulation in which multiple agents exist and interact in the simulated world. An example of a multi-agent simulation is an ecosystem simulation: a large number of autonomous agents (animals) interacting with each other (eating and breeding) and the environment.

In the ParticleFountain demo, you can see a particle system made up of hundreds of independent agents.

### 3D Spatial Simulation

breve is a simulation environment which is used primarily for 3D spatial simulations. This means that breve simulates 3D physical space and that simulated agents occupy and interact in this physical space. Because of this, breve can be used for realistic simulations involving space, such as physical simulations. This is in contrast to simulation environments which model space in 2D or which treat "space" only as an abstract concept.

In the DLA demo, a fractal structure forms in 3D space.

### Physical Simulation

breve is capable of realistic physical simulation. This means that agents in the simulated world can be configured to behave just as real objects do, according to the laws of physics. If a ball is placed in the air above a floor, for example, physical simulation can be used to make the ball realistically fall toward the floor and bounce. Among other things, physical simulation can be used for realistic simulation of robots, vehicles and animals.

In the Walker demo, a physically simulated creature learns to walk.

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Thanks and Acknowledgments | Table of Contents | Installing and Running the breve Application on Mac OS X