Do they have awareness of the other boids around them?
Try increasing the collision avoidance importance in the options and decreasing everything else. Generally, playing with the sliders can result in completely different behaviors.
Absolutely beautiful. I will definitely take a crack at making the screensaver myself when I get around it it.
But yours feel much better.
Another great take on an HTML5 flocking implementation is Alex Cruikshank's "birds on a line" demo, in which the birds also "land" on wires. I really like how Alex handles 3-dimensionality by adjusting the darkness of the birds so that the further "back" they are, the lighter they appear.
demo: http://carbonfive.github.com/html5-playground/birds-on-a-lin... source: https://github.com/acruikshank/html5-playground/blob/gh-page...
https://github.com/iamwilhelm/frock
In my experience tweaking the variables, to make it look 'realistic', the settings need to change as the number of boids increase. So what might work for n boid, won't work for m boids, where m >> n.
In addition, you need to limit the turn angle for the boids. They don't look like they're flocking as much as they're orbiting. Just as birds can't turn on a dime (actually, they can. I've seen a sparrow change direction in mid-flight just as I was going to hit it with my car going 40 mph, but for the purpose of flocking it looks better when they can't.), you don't want your boids to, so you get a swooping effect and feel.
It's not web based unfortunately so here's a short video of it running: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eY4DHcsuv1Y&feature=youtu...
And sourcecode: https://github.com/OneHP/murmuration
Also because I'm not great with my vector maths you'll spot that the boids have some odd behaviour where they favour vertical movement. Strange little bug.
Here's my last appeal:
