The paper presents recent trends in the area of Cellular Automata (CA) originated microscopic models of crowd. There are many interesting applications of CA-based models, which incorporate different definitions of floor fields, grouping behavior, building complex scenarios, parallelisation of computing processes, as well as the development of validation and verification tests. Thus, due to the observed rapid development of discrete crowd simulation models, they become a real alternative to force-based ones. It is especially visible in a new kind of crowd-model application, where simulation is required to cooperate with different sensors in real-time regime.