Abstract:
Crowds and other flock-like group motion are often modeled as interacting particle systems. These
multi-agent simulations are computationally expensive because each
agent must consider all of the others, if only to identify its
neighbors. For large crowds, simple implementations are too slow since
computation grows as the square of agent population. Faster approaches
often rely on spatial hashing
where a partitioning of space is used to accelerate crowd simulation.
This same partitioning can form the basis of a scalable multi-processor
approach to large, fast crowd simulations, as in [Quinn et al. 2003].
This paper describes an implementation of that approach for PLAYSTATION®3
which supports simulation and display of simple crowds of up to 15,000
individuals at 60 frames per second.
Keywords:
crowd simulation, multi-agent simulation, interacting particle systems,
flocking, boids, behavioral animation, parallel processing, distributed
processing, multi-processor.
Citation:
Reynolds, C. (2006) Big Fast Crowds on PS3. In Proceedings of Sandbox (an ACM
Video Games Symposium), Boston, Massachusetts, July 2006, pages ?-?.
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