To make the game world more lively passengers, pedestrians and drivers are simulated as animated characters. The character models are located in res/models/model/characters/ and identified by a special metadata block.

The model files consist of the following parts:

function data()
return {
  -- bounding box
  -- collider
  -- levels of detail
  metadata = {
    availability = {
      yearFrom = 1850,
      yearTo = 1920,
    },
    colorConfig = {
      configs = {
	{
	  { 0.72, 0.70, 0.65, },
	  { 0.40, 0.36, 0.34, },
	  { 0.62, 0.60, 0.58, },
	  { 0.81, 0.67, 0.63, },
	},
        ...
      },
    },
    person = {
      drivingLicenses = { "WATER", },
      gender = "FEMALE",
    },
  },
  version = 1,
}
end

The availability block restricts the character to be available in a certain era only. yearFrom and/or yearTo can be left out or set to zero to define an indefinite start respectively end year.

Character models can be recolored to get more diversity in the game world. The colorConfig block contains a list named configs that consists of a list of configuration blocks. As the character models use a material with a four channel color blend map, each of the blocks has a set of 4 different colors with three values for the three color channels red, green and blue in a range of 0 to 1.

The person block is the unique identifyer for character models. It contains two properties:

• drivingLicenses is a list of keys. If left blank, the character is used as pedestrian or passenger. If at least one of the keys “BUS”, “TRUCK”, “TRAM”, “RAIL”, “WATER”, “AIR” and “AIR_OUTDOOR” is used, the character is used as a crew model for the matching types of vehicles.
• gender is a key that is either “FEMALE” or “MALE”. It is used to select matching character models to female or male resident names.

The character models support various animation events to reflect the current state of the people:

• driving is a looped animation where the character sits in a low driving seat like in a car.
• driving_upright is a looped animation where the character sits on a higher driving seat like in most other vehicles.
• idle is a looped animation where the character stands around literaly doing nothing. This is used when pedestriants are waiting at traffic lights or passengers at stations as well as standing passengers in vehicles.
• sitting is a looped animation where the character sits around. This is usually used for passengers in vehicles.
• walk is a looped animation for walking pedestriants and passengers.