Attack on the Clones: Managing Player Perceptions of Visual Variety and Believability in Video Game Crowds

Crowds of non-­‐player characters are increasingly common in contemporary video games. It is often the case that individual models are re-­‐used, lowering visual variety in the crowd and potentially affecting realism and believability. This paper explores a number of approaches to increase visual diversity in large game crowds, and discusses a procedural solution for generating diverse non-­‐player character models. This is evaluated using mixed methods, including a " clone spotting " activity and measurement of impact on computational overheads, in order to present a multi-­‐faceted and adjustable solution to increase believability and variety in video game crowds. Introduction Procedural crowd generation techniques are increasingly common in the video games industry to simulate large groups of agents. Hordes of zombies have been rendered in games such as the also rely on the simulation of "realistic" and "believable" multi-­‐agent crowds for the player to interact with. When simulating crowds in a virtual environment such as a game, it is often hard to produce a great deal of variety in characters. Usually due to the complexity of manual character modelling, it is very time-­‐consuming for a 3D modeller to manually create a