hello guy i’m currently making a small game to be a start point but my true plans is to make a "life simulation game like the sims game but much more complex and complete, then for that i’m interested and curious about "how good is the current AI on unreal engine, i means not only to make character “have life” but how it can "support it without explod itself
here my plans:
i’m planing in making a "living town, this game will be more like a full alive town simulation, like i want to all npcs in game have a purpose, they will not just be spawned walk around npcs, the plans is to have “each npc” have a cicle/routine like for exemple:
NPC A: live in a house, work in a night bar as barist his shedule start at 18:00pm to 02:00am(8 hours), then during this time he will be selling drinks and snacks and have some interactions he will have "needs like " need to go to bathroom and all but aside that he will be working, then aside from this moment to go bathroom he will remain work, then when the 02:00 he will end his shedule then go home to sleep, before sleep he is too hungry he will try to eat something fast if him is too tired after work and if he is too dirty then take a fast showed then go to sleep, let’s say which he ending going to sleep at 03:30am (taking in account distance to get home and eat and taking a shower, then he sleep for like 8 hours, making him wake up as 11:30am, then he wil brush teeth or something like that and wait for the time to be 12 and he can eat the lunch, after that he can go do others things like stay in home and have some fun watching tv or clean house, or some atletic activites or he can leave home to walk around or buy something he need or meet some friends, taking in account he lives alone don’t have a family, then he will stuffs until it’s near 17pm then if him not already on home he go home and take shower, eat and be ready to go to work.
ok that is is shedule ofcourse he will have some days without work where he can have afull day for himself and bla bla bla.
now we have a NPC b which will work at 08:00am then he have to wake up around 06:00 am and do all stuffs, like brush teeth take shower eat and be ready to work until let’s say 18:pm when he comes home then have sometime with family and bla bla bla.
those are exemples of how each npc will work on the game, all of then will have they own life, traits and all those stuffs you want from a life simulation, for what i get while this part is a huge and complex work stil doable with a lot of time and efforts.
the big point for me is how good unreal is to handle it, i means not 1 or 2 or even 10 npcs, buts let’s say a whole town with let’s say 100 or maybe 500npcs if it can be doable for a game and how taxing this sort of ai can be in the engine and ofcourse in consoles or computers, like i would be able to make a full town with each npc being a “living being”??? or still impossible to do that??.
another note as i told npc will be "part of the town and they have a level of relevance, which i means if by any means this npc die it can have a big impact in the town based on “who was killed” for exemple a npc which work as a teach in a school and is the only teach for his class, then he is killed then his class will be “closed” for a short brief until a new teacher is hired, it can be another npc or a player it don’t auto replace the one killed before the game generate a “new teacher” the game will give a brief chance to the player to work on it or will do a search in town if have a living npc which can replace the dead teacher before generate a new npc in the town, it can have a even huge impact if let’s say all the school staff is killed leading the school to close and if not possible to find a new “replace soon” the school become abandoned and new one need be created and the abandoned school can be demolished to create a new one over it or it can be reformed and stay abandoned and become like "ghost haunted or become a place for crime and stuffs like that.
if too many peoples are killed in the town it can have even more impact, the game never will auto spawn new peoples it will take sometime to emulate some consequences for those cases.
you also have stuffs like generations and kids and childrens from the npcs will grow up and become new workers and bla bla bla each npc and even the player will have a life cicle going from birth to die of age at very old or be killed by something else.
i’m interested to know if unreal could handle it, also each character can have around 100k to 200k tris(or from 50k vertices to 100 to 120k vertices) in lod 0 and textures going from 1k to 4k.
important notes, the game don’t need keep rendering the whole town and animations at all times it can render and animate only what is visible like most games but the important part is which all the npcs would be aways active in game not just "spawn when needed, for exemple my character would be at home, and have only the house being rendered and having animations but the town npcs ai will be running and things would be happening all the times like while my character is at home, it would have peoples at the store buying stuffs, peoples ate the hospital, peoples bein robbed, or mudered in different places and i would be losing most of the stuffs and would something happening near me to catch my attention, because the town is running, the ai simulation still running.
then the question is if unreal is strong to handle it and around how much “of those npcs” it could handle before it’ start to get broken??
let’s say the machine is a ps 4 xbox x and pc are still I7 7700 video card being a nvida 10x with 16 giga ram memory and hds(not ssd), how much you thing unreal could handle and what type of pc/console it would need to hunadle it???