We watched hours of footage of crowds moving around theme parks, and we captured footage of our own.ġ0,000 guests was the number that we targeted right from the beginning, and simulating each one individually seemed like a real challenge, so we focused on a smaller number. That involved reading lots of research papers, studying techniques and analyzing the feasibility of each one, taking into account scalability, memory usage and CPU performance. We reviewed the state of the art in relation to crowd simulation and navigation. I wanted to capture little moments like walking by an entertainer doing silly things and seeing other guests watching and reacting. One thing I was particularly invested in was bringing the atmosphere of a real crowd into our virtual world, and in making each park guest aware of their surroundings. We also had to implement non-standard approaches for sound, art and animation systems.Īt the beginning of Planet Coaster’s development we knew we wanted to move the genre forward. We have parallelized the computation across CPU cores and frame boundaries to minimize impact on the frame rate. We use potential/flow fields to simulate the crowd in Planet Coaster. ![]() Trying to add collision avoidance afterward becomes a mess of edge case handling. Usually each agent would compute a path separately and then move along it, but this tends to be very expensive and doesn’t scale well. Traditional pathfinding methods aren’t suitable for simulating huge numbers of characters in real time. We also wanted them to be able to handle curved paths, which had proven a challenging task in crowd simulations from our previous games but something we considered essential to Planet Coaster. In Planet Coaster’s voxel-based sandbox we wanted to simulate 10,000 park guests at once and we wanted them to look like a real crowd. That meant huge numbers, few intersections, and novel approaches to sound, art and animation. What: Building Believable Crowds in Planet Coasterįor Planet Coaster, we wanted to make the best-ever crowds in the SIM genre. I really love building believable worlds, and game development is definitely the place to be to make that happen. Most recently I worked on the crowd simulation in Planet Coaster. ![]() I then worked on building destruction and ragdolls for Screamride. I’ve worked with some really fun signal processing on Kinect Disneyland Adventures so we could map the player’s movements to their in-game avatar with as little jitter and lag as possible. I worked on reactive water simulation and the physics in Kinectimals. ![]() I usually end up working on something physics or simulation related. I studied Computer Science and Theoretical Physics at University and did an MSc in Game Development at the University of Hull before joining Frontier nine years ago. I am a principal programmer for Frontier. Who: Owen McCarthy, Principal Programmer at Frontier Check out earlier installments, including using a real human skull for the audio of Inside, and the challenge of creating a VR FPS in Space Pirate Trainer.
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