314.159 cake celebration

Our core pedestrian simulation engine has reached a special milestone which was a “pie” moment for us.

On 21 June, one of my colleagues said: the next “Pie” moment is for a special number. So they aimed for 𝜋 * 100 000: definitely “Pi time”. We aimed for achieving this moment before July 22, which is also known as Pi Approximation Day (22/7), and we succeeded :-)

Here is an update of the performance table of our pie post on 21-06-2020. It shows that the performance was again improved with more than 40% in 2,5 weeks time. This is due to moving from an object-oriented approach to a data-driven approach in our data structures and algorithms.

In our experiments, real-time means that the pedestrian simulation needs a calculation increment of 0,1s, and the graphics engine at least 25 frames per second (fps). On our consumer PC, we can fast forward a simulation with 20K 3D-animated pedestrians in SimCrowds (made with Unity3D) by factor of 18,3 while keeping 45 fps in rendering.

By making better use of parallelism in Unity3D (DOTS, ECS), its performance is nearing the performance of our underlying core simulation engine. This is possible because our core engine only uses the CPU, while the heavy rendering and animation is done in Unity. Thank you Mèìr and Stijn.

We will create a video for you to see the pedestrians within Unity, it is just amazing ;-). More on that in one of our next posts.

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