Most suitable AI system for a first person stealth game?

News & General Discussion
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Hi there!

So just shooting this out. Hope this is an appropriate forum.
The asset store is filled with a ton of AI systems. It’s a bit overwhelming.

If you were to develop a smallish demo of a first person stealth game in a medieval setting.
Would you have any recommendations in my case?

Target features: (Or as many as possible)

  • Being able to do patrolling guards.
  • It should be very easy to get animated characters in. From Eg. the UMA asset.
  • Guards chasing player.
  • Possibly guards alerting other guards. Not super important.
  • Player alerting guards and escaping from them. Distance based or hiding behind cover. Guards would return to their path after a while.
  • Ranged (shooting bows) and melee combat. Melee has prio.
  • Visibility scanning cone and near distance trigger.
  • Bonus: The player being able to hide in dark areas/bushes.
  • Easily accessible… drag n drop… node based something? I’m not a programmer. Too ambitious? :slight_smile:

I’ve been looking around on some of these… but I’m not really sure where to begin. There’s not a whole lot of unitypackage demo’s out there.

Emerald AI

ICE Creature Control

AI Warrior

AI Designer Pro (demo videos doesn’t look super convincing)

Behavior Designer

Node AI

Apex?.. Behave 2?.. numerous others…

cheers!

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I use Behavior Designer for all my AI in everything I do because it’s easily extensible to cover any edge case. I really recommend it above all else.

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+1 for Behavior Designer. Extremely flexible, well thought out and excellent support.

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Awesome! Thanks guys for your quick answers! :slight_smile: Looking at some of their videos now. Looks promising!

And please don’t hold back out there if you have experiences and opinions on the matter to share. :slight_smile:

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Free videos on youtube called Gamer to Game Designer. S3 playlist covers how to create all these types of behaviors and more.

I haven’t used any of those asset packages, but the few script packages I have bought weren’t much use to me as you still need to know how to program in order to implement them. Might as well just learn to program and do things yourself (although seeing how other people do things is a great aid to learning).

A fantastic book to help with getting a handle on C# is :

Begin to Code with C#
Rob Miles

I got turned onto it via some old thread on these forums and I am very happy I bought it. After about a month of doing online tutorial videos I had figured out some stuff about coding, but I really lacked fundamental understanding of what is really going on. This book starts at the very beginning and is very thorough. Half way through the book and I started understanding why codes I had written weren’t working.

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Thanks! It would be SO awesome if I could just sit down and have the time and learn to code it myself. And I do enjoy learning new skills. Absolutely. :slight_smile:

But it would be a significant time investment I can afford to make. Estimated It would probably take me a couple of years to get just… somewhat comfortable with C#.
Even finding a programmer who could do it for me would take some time and focus.

I’m a professional designer/artist with 15+ years in the games industry. With some UE4 Blueprint experience. A bit of GameMaker coding on small hobby side projects. I’ve been looking a tiny tiny bit into C#. But it feels like such a huge beast to tackle. I know there’s a lot of tutorials and all.

But let’s say a small investment of around €80 would save me infinite amount of time. That would be the way to go for me at this point.

Maybe I’ll take some time learning some small coding parts. On smaller things than game AI.

Thanks for your input! :slight_smile:

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The nice thing about Behavior Designer is that it’s a standard behavior tree system, which is the kind of system that much of the industry uses. Devs will often post screenshots of their behavior trees. (I think Damian Isla has shared some screenshots of Halo’s BTs in various presentations.) You can recreate them in Behavior Designer to get a handle on how they work, and then use that experience to write your own BTs.

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