[thomascountz]

The section on feedback control reminded me of procedural animation where you don't calculate the velocities and positions directly; instead the animation is a consequence of constraints and a target.

I took your PD controller concept and added anticipation using two targets: the original mouse target, and an "anticipation" target set proportionally based on the distance from the point to the main target[1].

This also made me think of Jelly Car and the amazing simulations they did using rigid frames for soft bodies, called Shape Matching[2]. Instead of simulating the soft body physics directly, they used a frame, springs, and "gas" to constrain points, which moved towards targets fixed to the frame.

[1]: https://editor.p5js.org/Thomascountz/sketches/YXWm_VV6s

[2]: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/deep-dive-the-soft...

[pahgawk]

Author here! Nice, thanks for taking the time to create that demo! I also like the look of commenting out `vel.set(0, 0)` when the anticipation target is reached, as it has less "snap" between velocities. Although if you keep velocity the same, now it'll go a little farther than the anticipation target. So maybe if you wanted to have a specific distance of anticipation (I think something an animator would reasonably want to do), one could do some math to figure out where to place the target position so that by the time it decelerates to 0, the distance is the real anticipation distance.