Hi. I am working on a nice City level and am at the point where I need to populate it with many AIs. The UCrowdManager looked perfect for this but after attempting it, I realized that the City Sample Crowds is not compatible with 5.2, plus the documentation also announces that 5.1 is the highest version yet supported (at least with docs). I quickly did a test using the AI Detour Controller and it worked slick only I have to do the pathing and it’s not putting bulk AIs in the level. I have to place them myself. The performance is still quite good with Detour control as I seem to get 60 FPS solid when having about 50 of them.
My question is this, should I be waiting for the City Sample Crowds to be updated so I can figure out how MassAI works and use it, or is this Detour Controller just as good a way to implement a crowd performance wise. I’m not talking about a large number of AIs wandering the streets, maybe 50 max and this is the only section in the entire game with an actual city.
Edit: I partially answered my own question. The DetourController, is not efficient enough to do this if Metahumans are used. The frame rate dropped by 20fps if using 50 Metahumans rather than Quinns. I’m only guessing that if I used MassAI/City Sample Crowds it would be much better than that for just 50 wandering AIs. I guess I’m waiting until there are docs / updates for 5.2.
Turns out there were useful tutorials on MassAI that didn’t depend on the City Sample Crowds obsolete content. It was right here so my bad. If someone else runs into this, it is MassAI, Mass Crowd, State Tree with Custom Character | UE5 | Community tutorial. This tutorial gave explanations of the components and assets involved and was highly instructive.
While the above tutorial got me in the ballpark, it still needed tweaks for 5.2. The excellent document https://dev.epicgames.com/community/learning/JXMI/unreal-engine-your-first-60-minutes-with-mass is necessary to get rid of the many errors that result from implementing mass on 5.2 attempting to use any of the tutorials, including a bug due to be released with 5.2.1 (though workarounds are shown in that document and fixed most of the issues through project settings changes). It’s also quicker to grasp the information than any of the video tutorials.
A separate (I think) bug that is shown by the message “No associated meshes for this intanced static mesh type” in the output log is referenced in bugfix UE-184740. I have not looked at the fix in code and guess I’ll be waiting for that release. Mass spawning appears to be working fine based on the Fragment DebugVisualization, but spawning any complex actors (like NPCs) wouldn’t work on 5.2 (at least as I attempted to implement it).
So my original question is somewhat moot as I was unable to actually test the performance. If no one has an answer, I’ll close this but leave it here since it was such a slog to figure it all out until I found the written document.