MegaBoids in a Mass Entity plugin to create groups of ambient NPCs with rich behavior. Built upon the common boid algorithm with alignment, cohesion and separation, MegaBoids makes it easy to create atmosphere within your environment by adding thousands of entities with small CPU and GPU overhead. Whether it's flocks of birds, swarms of insects, schools of fish or your custom groups of aliens, this plugin has it covered with it's extensive feature set and support for custom behavior injection.
Features
Mass Entity: Based on Mass Entity for maximum performance.
Multi threaded: Fully multi threaded to make the most use of those CPU cores and limit the impact on the game thread.
Movement models: Extensive set of common movement models (Ground, gliding, kinetic particle & rigid bodies, etc.).
Driving forces: Extensive set of common force sources to drive the boid movement (Impulse, burst, follow path, flee, etc.).
Environment forces: Add forces to your environment to simulate water or air currents for more dynamic and rich movement.
Obstacle avoidance: Avoid clipping through the environment by avoiding obstacles.
Mixed entities: Supports mixed entity types and visual representations within a group for realistic interactions.
HISM based rendering: Hierarchical instanced static mesh rendering with LOD support and shader animation with per instance custom data.
Actor based rendering: Using Mass Entity traits, you can simulate your boids efficiently yet the keep actor based rendering goodness.
Extensible: Inject your custom project specific forces and movement models to get the exact behavior you are aiming for (C++ only).
Easy API: We take great care to hide the implementation details and let you focus on what matters to you with a simple API that doesn't require learning more than the basics of Mass Entity.
Additional behaviors: Compatible with the usual Mass Entity traits to extend the entity behaviors.
Full UE5.1+ support: All features supported in Unreal 5.1+
Get more information, documentation and to try the demo project by heading to the project's GitHub page: https://github.com/MegaPunkGames/MegaBoidsDemo
CURRENTLY IN ALPHA STAGE.
We are currently releasing this plugin as an ALPHA version while we keep on adding new features. We are happy with the current architecture which allows us to extend the API and modify it's internals with limited impact on the users. Therefore, we will now focus mostly on adding new features and bug fixing but you should expect a smooth transition over to the beta and official release afterwards. The price of the plugin is reduced until the official release.
Currently planned features for official release:
New driving force subprocessors & improve existing ones
New environment subprocessors & improve existing ones
New movement model subprocessors
More obstacle types and allow inside vs. outside avoidance
Optimize the HISM renderer to reduce CPU cost
Throttling/Time slicing to reduce computations per frame
Debug hook to facilitate debugging of custom subprocessors
More...