Crowd Simulation [Help Request]

Hi,

First I am not a programmer, so my skills are limited to Blueprints.

My goal is to simulate a crowd a bit similar to this game:

Basically, I need to simulate several characters waiting in a line like in a Theme Park. Each character in the line should never overtake the character in front of him. (I know this is not always the case in real life, but I want to keep things simple enough) Then, each character should know when the character in front of him is moving forward so that it can move as well. In a nutshell, I would like to be able to spawn several groups of people following each other and keep track of each group in a line.

I have done some research and I found this tutorial about animating characters following a spline:

I have also come across this topic, which explains well how to simulate a crowd:

https://forums.unrealengine.com/development-discussion/content-creation/1423461-how-would-an-ai-crowd-like-the-ones-in-assassins-creed-be-done-in-ue4

I would appreciate if someone who is quite experienced in the AI field could give me a few guidelines to start with.

.Should I use “real” AI with behavior trees and a navmesh or should I use animated characters following a spline with almost no AI logic?

.What kind of logic should I implement for each character

.Where should start I optimize things to keep good performances? (lighting, mesh LODs, animations, etc…)

I hope I have been clear enough.

I know this thread is quite old and the YouTube link isn’t working anymore.

I started to work on an optimization or completely new plugin to make a crowd simulation a lot more easier.

Here is the link: https://forums.unrealengine.com/comm…orde-framework.

In my use case disabling the shadows and the mesh collisions turned into a lot better performance.