Scalable procedural crowd simulation in large environments

Abstract

In this work, the use of Entity-Component-Systems (ECS) in the design of scalable crowd simulators shall be explored. The procedural aspect of the envisaged crowd simulator is such that the system would be able to intelligently reduce the load, density, and quality of the active crowd to suit the underlying hardware, while still generating believable agent behaviour. A procedurally generated crowd simulation system for multiplayer based game modes is created using Unity’s DOTS system in order to evaluate and assess the created system’s performance and scalability. This is done by creating various case studies and simulations and plotting the frames per second (FPS) for each case study. The results proved that the designed system was indeed a scalable and performant system, with over 3000 entities being able to concurrently run at 60 FPS in the most complex simulation. The system also proved to be very modular due to the use of ECS and the system being created in a Data-Oriented Design (DOD) way. These results indicate that the use of ECS in the design of scalable crowd simulations, such as in video games, should not only be used, but encouraged.