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<article-title>Creating Densely Populated Virtual Environments</article-title>
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<author><a href="mailto:mcalinden@ict.usc.edu"><name>Ryan McAlinden</name></a></author>
<aff>University of Southern California&#8212;Institute for Creative Technologies<br/> 13274 Fiji Way Marina del Rey, CA 90292</aff>

<author><a href="mailto:dini@ict.usc.edu"><name>Don Dini</name></a></author>
<aff>University of Southern California&#8212;Institute for Creative Technologies<br/> 13274 Fiji Way Marina del Rey, CA 90292</aff>

<author><a href="mailto:merchant@ict.usc.edu"><name>Chirag Merchant</name></a></author>
<aff>University of Southern California&#8212;Institute for Creative Technologies<br/> 13274 Fiji Way Marina del Rey, CA 90292</aff>

<author><a href="mailto:vanlent@ict.usc.edu"><name>Michael van Lent</name></a></author>
<aff>University of Southern California&#8212;Institute for Creative Technologies<br/> 13274 Fiji Way Marina del Rey, CA 90292</aff>


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<title>ABSTRACT</title>
<p>Few virtual environments are capable of supporting large numbers
of autonomous agents (&#62; 5000) with complex decision-making on
a single machine. This demonstration depicts such an agent
infrastructure set within a game-based virtual environment. The
embodied agent framework consists of two primary components: a
lower-level navigation layer consisting of commercially-available
AI middleware, and a higher-level cellular automata system driven
by agent goals, resources and thresholds. The overarching gamebased
infrastructure consists of these two AI components, along
with an ICT-developed perception system sitting atop the
Gamebryo rendering engine. The typical number of agents
supported on a dual-core CPU with a modern graphics card is
~10,000 rendering at 30 frames-per-second. To support this
quantity and level of intelligence several design considerations
were implemented, including the use of multiple threads, a
clone/sprite-based avatar view, and a dynamic level-of-detail
update system. Future work includes distributing the AI
mechanism across multiple machines to support numbers of
agents a level of magnitude higher than is currently possible.</p>
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