About how many NPCs are planned to be inside a station walking around: 10 to 20, or more like 50, etc.?
TL;DRNo fixed number is given; the goal is as many NPCs as make sense, possibly hundreds in large areas, using a level-of-detail approach since AI itself is cheap, unlike animation or rendering.
So our goal is to have as many as we can, right? So I think the idea is...
I would say not even that, though. I would say as many as makes sense. Because if I can fit 200 in a small area, I don't want to, right?
Of course. But big squares, like some of the landing areas that are pretty big, you may want to have hundreds, right? So the idea is actually to use a kind of LOD system for the AI as well, so the ones you want to interact with are more complex and they cost more, but the ones that are further away are cheaper. The reality is that the AI itself is very cheap, because the way we are developing subsumption is almost based on templates and then what we call runtime data. So each AI is actually a subset in memory of stuff that they execute. And also the amount of tasks, the subtasks that they execute at a certain given time, is pretty minimal. So we can actually run a lot of AI, but then we have other dependencies like animations or rendering.
I don't think AI is really intensive, if you will.
No.