Crowds

Important

This page explains the functionalities of the Agents Navigation - Crowds extension package.

This is an alternative pathing solution to NavMesh that comes with a new extension package called Agents Navigation - Crowds. It is based on continuum crowds, where agents use flow fields to navigate.

The flow field is a grid-based graph, and a key difference is that the agent's steering velocity is calculated not per agent but per grid cell. The key differences are as follows:

  • Performance cost scales with grid size multiplied by group count instead of the pure agent count. This allows for huge crowds with lower performance costs.
  • Pathing and avoidance are combined, resulting in a greatly reduced likelihood of scenarios where agents get stuck due to local avoidance.
  • Each agent group must share common destination goals, which means performance can quickly degrade if there are many groups.
  • Agents exhibit much better flow in huge crowds, but at the same time, agents lose individuality and favor group flow instead of their own.

Overview