Crowd Densities revisited
In the comments thread on Greg's welcome post back last September, we had a bit of a chat about achieving real-world crowd densities on next-gen platforms. If you haven't yet seen Capcom's Dead Rising, it's worth checking out the new official trailer released last Friday - I count possibly 100+ NPCs on screen in dense urban environments, with no apparent interpenetrations and quite a bit of animation going on.
Of course, the genius of Dead Rising is that the NPCs in question are supposed to appear like idiotic zombies :) I imagine they have pretty simple flocking mechanics, with direction goals to converge on enemies, circulate round the shopping mall, and so on. Has anyone played the demo? I'd be keen to know a few things:
1. Do the zombies seem to be doing graph-search nav as well as steering behaviours?
2. Do they interact with their environment much? (e.g. operating doors, picking up objects)
3. Do they take part in scripted set-pieces?
4. Do some exhibit much more complex behaviour than others? (e.g. shopkeeper mentioned in IGN preview)
5. Do they exhibit a wide variety of animations? In one crowd?