We’re evaluating whether there is sufficient interest in behavior trees in the Unity community to merit porting our tools.
So what are behavior trees? Behavior trees are a new way to structure AI logic that has become very popular in big budget AAA studio projects. There are many benefits to using behavior trees but the most important benefit is that it makes AI code much more scalable and manageable than Finite State Machine (FSM) based approaches.
So who are we? We are Game Brains. We make a design tool to help you create, execute and debug your behavior trees. You can find out about us on our website.
So why are we posting? We want to know if people in the Unity community are interested in behavior trees and would they buy a tool for commercial projects.
BTW We’re a huge fan of indie development. So we believe in supporting indie developers by making all our tools free for non-commercial uses. If you don’t make money of your project then we don’t expect to make money. We’re just happy you are using our tool. The only time we believe in charging is if you are creating a commercial product.
It’s free, using a pseudo creative commons attribution type license. So you would need to have a great deal of value added in order to compete with free, when your product is $300.
Why do you ask questions on our behalf instead of just telling us the features? Because somebody said it’s a great way to make sales. It’s also annoying.
Hi guys, thank you for your input, it is really appreciated.
You are right saying that we did not include the features (you can see them in our webpage, under the ‘Products’ section). Anyway, here is a summarize of the already implemented features:
Behavior Tree Editor for debugging:
Open and load your behavior trees in the editor.
Create new behavior trees and edit them using a friendly-user interface.
Parametrize your leaf nodes and non leaf nodes.
Connect the editor with the behavior tree library, integrated in your game.
Load behavior trees dynamically in your game.
Debug and set breakpoints in your running behaviors from the editor.
Play, step, pause and stop your loaded behaviors from the interface.
Enable and disable tree branches dinamically from the editor.
Review your execution in a graphical tree view, going back and forward in the log.
Save your logs and behavior trees to review them at any time.
Analyze the behavior tree performance, including node execution calls, returned status and time spent in each node.
Open Source C++ library of behavior trees.
Configure your behavior trees to load from a XML file or from the Behavior Tree Editor.
Root node, selectors, sequences and up to seven different types of decorators.
Create your own leaf nodes within a few easy steps.
Blackboard manager implemented to use custom blackboards in your behavior trees.
Assertion tools for a safer way of programming.
Two demos integrated, manuals and tutorials to understand the library and its integration.
I also want to show you some videos with our system in action, so you can get an idea about what is this about:
We have been working in this software for more than six months, so it is quite advanced and debugged. We have also had a beta trial period, with more than a hundred users, so we have a very refined and bug free product (for instance, one of our most active users has written a post in his own blog - honestly, we did not ask him to do that - about this software: http://artemkoval.com/tag/behavior-tree-implementation/).
I hope this information help you to see what we are offering. Furthermore, this is a fairly new tool, so we are quite open to provide those features that our users definitely would need. And, of course, we provide full personal support in different ways in order to help the users to integrate and use our tool in their system.