This Unreal Engine 5 gladiator game renders a whopping 18,000 characters in real time

Crowds still difficult in video game development? Try counting the number of real-time rendered characters in the audience in this Unreal Engine 5.6 game (see what is Unreal Engine? and our guide to the best game development software).

Creating crowds in video games has long been a challenge because of the complex performance requirements involved in rendering lots of individual entities with believable behaviour. It takes some sophisticated AI, pathfinding and animation to achieve realism without severely impairing gameplay or frame rates.

But Trakonius, a roman gladiator-inspired action-roguelike, achieves an impressive feat. The developer says there are up to 18,000 character rendered in this fully static-lit scene.

18.000 People Rendered In Realtime With Vertex Anim Textures from r/UnrealEngine5

Edvar Studio's Trakonius is still in development with a release date yet to be announced, but a developer known as Animatolog has been sharing progress on Reddit. In a recent post, they shared a behind-the-scenes look at a scene that features 18,000 characters rendered in real time using Vertex Animation Textures, a technique that stores mesh animation data in textures rather than the CPU.

The developer says the static-lit scene used one stationary Directional Light, and the crowd was placed using the Foliage tool for optimisation. They don't cast any dynamic light in game's arenas, only using contact shadows and a pre-computed AO Mask. The result is just a 1-2 fps loss on a Nvidia RTX 2060 PC.

Animatolog said there are three LODs for the audience with three Vertex Animation Textures.

Trakonius - Trailer - YouTube

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Some have pointed out that the crowd's behaviour isn't exactly 100% realistic, since absolutely everyone is going wild, with nobody just sitting and watching. That kind of realistic variation would require a mix of different audience groups playing different animations so that everyone isn't doing the same thing with offset timing.

That would mean a further performance reduction, but personally, I'm happy to suspend disbelief to an extent with details like this. After all, similar things happen in both animated and live-action movies all the time.

See the Trakonius page on Steam for more on the game.

For more UE5 news, see the ongoing controversy over Unreal Engine 5 performance issues. We also have roundups of the best Unreal Engine 5 games and the best Unreal Engine 5 remakes.

For general game inspiration, don't miss our explainer on what is concept art?