What is a Stable amount of NPC’s that unreal can handle on screen at once for example a crowded map like these examples:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9E03KB-eoH4
So my question is what would be the best amount of NPC’s active all at once on a single map 100 NPCs? 200 NPCs? even if the project settings/crowd manager/Max Agnets is changed to let the game spawn more AI would this all depend on the power of the PCs video card and CPU power?
I am just trying to figure out the Golden Number of NPCs all active on map.
. How complex are those NPCS? (amount of meshes, materials and complexity of them, complexity of the skeleton, etc).
. How complex is the AI driving each NPC? All of the processing for AI decision making is processed by the CPU.
. Are those NPCs ticking all the time? Each actor ticking will increase its cost on the CPU.
. What kind of movement component do they use? Character movement component is very expensive on the CPU.
All in all it depends on what you want to do and how you plan to achieve it. For instance, for a game I am making we need hundreds of thousands of characters being simulated in the world but we make sure to only render the ones the character can actually see at any given time.
There is no easy answer to this. I recomend you testing with lots of characters and see how you would go about making it more efficient.
One piece of advice I can give you is to make sure character that will never be used by the player to not have a camera arm spring or anything that requieres physics to work because it will drain a lot of performance.
Yeah my game is a Wave survival against zombies and will require about 150 NPCs and 6 players active all at once, so if I use low poly meshes and textures also making use of the LOD far distance fade… then it could be possible?
for a result that would look similar to this?
Not this extreem but like 150ish NPCs...
My feeling is it depends as well on the hardware we are targeting, so are we targeting low end PC users or Mid or High end PC’s.
My game I feel will target Mid to High end PC rigs due to its large amount of NPCs all loading around the player… I just have massive doubts about how I will be able to optimize it all, or if this large amount of NPCs is even possible due to 2019’s PC hardware available… just hoping that the graphics cards of 2025 would evolve to let P games push boundary’s a little more, and allow for the average PC consumer to access it for an affordable cost.