An overview of crowd control

In Chapter 4, Crowd Chaos, we looked at creating crowds using wandering behaviors, where different crowd members worked individually to travel to different points. This works well for ambient crowds, but there was no working as a group. As there was no larger group-defined behavior or director managing crowds, our previous implementations required creating and configuring character AIs individually. Defining and configuring individual AIs is fine for smaller groups, but not practical when creating much larger crowds. In the demos in this chapter, we will look at crowds that work, or at least move, as a group. Moving AI characters in groups, also called flocks, has been a popular subject in AI for many years. The most popular system is called Boids, and it was designed in the 1980s by Craig Reynolds, a renowned computer graphics and AI developer, and the basic design is used in crowd AIs in most games today. In these systems, different simple steering behaviors...