The goal of this project will be to compare different options of making a crowd AI. The case study will be a Airport Simulation in which AIs find their way through the airport, they check in, go through security, head to the correct gate, and along the way find a seat to sit down for a while or go and buy something at a shop.
This week I worked on getting a good angle for this project; I was convinced I found a good angle, Menge.
Menge is an external library made for making Crowd Simulation easy. The developers made a Unity "implementation“. Sadly however, this implementation is very basic; you can’t add obstacles at runtime, and you can’t spawn more AIs at will; everything needs to be pre-defined in an XML file, this includes every vertex of every obstacle. You can't just place an obstacle in the Unity editor.
On top of that, the “documentation” is near non-existent. On the bright side, the paper about Menge, and crowd simulation as a whole, will still prove helpful. I looked for different plugins for crowd simulation in Unity, but found none that were free. I expanded my search to things other than Unity, but still found barely anything.
I did find some sources referencing Unreal’s out-of-the-box AIs, so I decided to look into those and test their boundaries; it seems this might be the best choice, and if it turns out Unreal’s Detour-Crowd-AIs aren’t up to snuff either, I’ll have to make my own AIs from scratch, but so far they seem sufficient.