Movie Theatre NPC System (Looking for Advice)

Hi there everyone, I am looking for advice on an NPC system I am currently scripting.

I am working on a game concept of managing a movie theatre business. This project requires a ton of NPCs and NPC interactions in the form of ticket booths, food ordering, and more. The idea is that NPCs with specific tickets will walk to and sit down in their designated movie theatre at the scheduled movie start time.

I’ve been working on a concept script for this system with the use of the open-sourced path finding module, SimplePath, but have ran into a variety of issues. When trying to transport 50+ NPCs to the theatre at once, i seem to receive a lot of ComputationError messages in the output with no specific indication of what the issue might be. Additionally, I plan to rewrite this system in OOP, but am not too sure how to properly group the NPCs to move them at the same time.

Here is my main question, what path finding modules would you recommend i use? Should I create something custom, or maybe even use something that doesn’t rely on PathFindingService? I am quite stuck here, but many games such as Retail Tycoon and Theme Park Tycoon manage to handle hundreds of NPCs at once with no issue, so I am sure it is possible for me as well.

If you have experience with this sort of thing it would be appreciated! I am getting quite frustrated with only half the NPCs deciding to follow the path, and the other just outputting “ComputationError” or “AgentStuck”.

Thank you so much, anything would be appreciated!

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Have a look at Justice the Awesome NPC Sytem:

Version 6 has a ‘state’ system for the NPCs so you could configure them to be Queueing, Walking, Viewing, etc.