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.

Planet coaster lag