Back in July 2006 – coincidentally the exact same month and year as when the TLOU YouTube page
was registered – Sony Computer Entertainment America’s Research and Development team published a presentation called “Big Fast Crowds on PS3″ which is about sandbox games. In the presentation, it describes the R&D team’s aims:
Goal:
- Simulate large groups of autonomous characters
Requirements:
- Real time: 60 frames per second
- High performance: thousands of individuals
- Take advantage of PS3’s Cell architecture
Additionally, it goes into detail saying the project will be
“high performance” and be able to show “up to 15,000 simple characters at 60 fps”. The research would then “be provided to developers as SDK sample code”. The presentation references crowds and flocks of large numbers of animals (click for full screen):