Animation of branching random diffusion

I just created a function to animate branching random diffusion (i.e., Brownian motion with speciation) in discrete time. The functions (optionally) calls several functions from the R package {animation}, and to save the resulting video to file, requires the installation of 'FFmpeg'. My function is available on my R-phylogenetics page (direct link here).

To run it after having installed {animation} and 'FFmpeg', first load the function from source:

> source("branching.diffusion.R")

then, try with the default options (but saving the animation to file using the filename record="diffusion.mp4"):

> branching.diffusion(record="diffusion.mp4")

Be warned, all the animation functions eat up lots of memory. If you just want to view the animation in R without saving it, simply set record=NULL (the default), i.e.:

> branching.diffusion()

The user can also change the variance of the BM process, the birth-rate, and the time of the simulation. One option, smooth, tells the function whether to destroy the existing plot and create a new one each generation using plot() (which results in a slower animation, but is smooth); or add the new bits of evolution using lines() (which results in a faster but choppy animation - although the saved movie should be unaffected). You can also specify the pause between generations (default, 0.02s) and the path to ffmpeg.exe (default path="C:/Program Files/ffmpeg/bin/ffmpeg.exe"). The video below was created using the function on its default settings. Enjoy!