Pedestrian system for an open-world game on Unreal Engine 4

What the talk is about

Ihor Pakhomov describes how his team built a pedestrian system for an open-world city of roughly 1.5 by 1.5 km on Unreal Engine 4. Placing pedestrians by hand, as in earlier games, was no longer practical, so they spawn near the player, walk along roads taken from city-editor data, and vanish when the player moves away. To react to the world, the team introduced points of interest: static ones (benches, posters) and event-based ones (shooting, fights). Pedestrians are described by tags, and their behavior is configured in a dedicated rules editor. The speaker shares Unreal optimizations: thread-safe animation nodes, no root motion, navmesh walking, precomputation, and lesser-known engine flags. He also admits mistakes, such as an overly small spawn radius, and outlines plans. Useful for programmers and designers of open-world games.