.NET Library/Book for Crowd Simulation

Question

I've been tasked with creating a simulation of people moving around. It could be a bunch of people walking through a restaurant or exiting a school. Searching around, I've found a bunch A* related stuff which is fine for one person but I will have a bunch. Is there a standard library people use for this stuff? Or a kind of algorithm I should look at? Or a book that will get me going?

Answer 1

I am by no means an AI guy, but I even I could understand this:

http://www.red3d.com/cwr/boids/

I found it a great starting point for emergent behaviour alogorthims and naturalistic movement/flocking. The entry page here is oriented around flying animals, but there are many links at the foot of the page.

Answer 2

Few games really pull off crowds well, but Assassin's Creed was pretty impressive. Each person had some (basic) objectives like begging for money, carrying pots to the marketplace, walking in a group etc. and all of this welded into a really impressive (compared to other games) simulation of a crowd.

Here is an article that pulls together various aspects of modeling crowds with links to various research papers: Simulating Crowd Flow Dynamics