[UPDATED] ICECreatureControl v1.4.0 - creature AI for enemies, animals, monsters, zombies ...


v1.4

ICECreatureControl is an incredible asset to breathe life into your virtual characters - within minutes and without typing one single line of code!

ICECreatureControl is an advanced AI system for Unity, which offers you a large spectrum of possibilities to integrate nearly each kind of creature quickly into your project. The ultimate ‘All-In-One’ AI for all your predators and prey animals, monsters, dragons, dinosaur, soldiers, zombies, aliens, bandits, pirates, trolls etc. but also the right solution for smart NPCs.

ICECreatureControl is ready to realize natural wildlife scenarios as well as tactical combat missions and animated city life scenes.

On land, on water and in the air!

ICECreatureControl supports swimming, diving and flying creatures as well as two and four-legged mammalian, creeping reptiles, multi-legged insects or floating ghosts.

Damage Handling

ICECreatureControl supports the original damage handler of UFPS, TPC, RFPSP, UnitZ and Easy Weapons. Further integrations are already in progress.

Multiplayer

ICECreatureControl is Multiplayer ready and works well with Photon Unity Networking (direct supported) but also with other network assets.

Animation

ICECreatureControl supports the Mecanim Animation System as well as Legacy animations.

Navigation

ICECreatureControl offers your creatures’ boundless worlds with its own internal pathfinding and avoidance system, which is perfect for procedural worlds or voxel based terrains, but ICE works also well with Unity’s Navigation Mesh and Aron’s A* Pathfinding Project. Both systems are fully supported and can be used as desired but they are not necessarily required.

Behaviors

ICECreatureControl gives you and your team unlimited freedom to customize the behavior of your creatures as desired. The internal behavior system allows the definition of a variable number of customized behavior rules for each thinkable scenario, whereby each rule provides a set of optional features (e.g. to adapt various motion settings, to play audio- and animations clips or to steer the Animation Controller, to instantiate new effects and objects, control body parts, tools and weapons, to adapt vital-signs and other status values, to pick-up items or to distribute items at certain places in scene etc.) and whatever your creature shall do, you can define it within such a behavior roll.

Targets

ICECreatureControl provides you to define several targets for each creature at the same time. Creatures with multiple targets will select the right one automatically according to the given situation, by using its customizable sensoria and selection criteria to identify relevant targets, assess risks and benefits, and react with appropriate behavior. In addition to the target selection, the selection criteria also allow dynamic relationships between the creature and its targets, because the creature could also react differently to a certain target, depending on the given conditions e.g. the predator will only attack if it is hungry or if its prey is weaker or already injured.

Abilities

ICECreatureControl creatures are friendly and harmless at birth, but with some training, they quickly become helpful companions who can collect items or use tools, but they can also deal with hand- and shooting weapons and mutate quickly into dangerous and aggressive combat machines.

For this, ICECreatureControl comes with an advanced weapon system and tons of additional components to increase the range of function and the abilities of your creature but of your player as well.

The most interesting components here are for sure the weapon system, which includes scripts for melee and long-range weapons, mines and other explosives, as well as a complete turret system, but also the other items and entities are worth mentioning. These collection includes scripts for flashlights, torch, machines and further tools, which your creatures (but also the player) can collect and use during the runtime. Furthermore, the additional component collection contains also several location and zone scripts and an environment system to steer the day/night cycle and to generate several environment values, such as time, temperatures, weather conditions etc., so your creatures can react to its surrounding environment and e.g. sleeping at night etc.

Finally ICECreatureControl also contains a powerful pool management system to handle the population of your creatures, spawning items and weapons and allows your creatures to find their targets quickly and resource-friendly.

Integration

ICECreatureControl works well with a large number of 3rd party assets out-of-the-box, but in some cases, it is advantageous to coordinate certain functions to achieve the best result (e.g. damage handling). Ice includes a smart integration system to handle such native integrations automatically. In this way the scripts of your ICE creatures as well as all other included ICE components can be merged clean and stable with the given code structure of external asset packages, just by clicking one single button. Currently supported are already A* Pathfinding Project, Photon Unity Networking, UFPS, TPC, RFPSP, UnitZ, Easy Weapon System, UniStorm, PlayMaker, Energy Bar Toolkit and GameFlow and further assets are already in the pipeline. But please note, all these integration features are extended benefits, which I provide for free to simplify the integration for you.

ICE World

ICECreatureControl as well as all additional components and integration features based on the ICE World framework, which provides you a feature-rich, stable and uniform scripting environment and therefore excellent matched and well balanced components. The whole code is strict object orientated and well-formed written in c# and fully included. In addition to that, interested customers can use GitHub to get access to beta sources and early updates. Certain parts of the ICE World can be also used for own projects to use certain features or to simplify the integration of own scripts.

Usability

ICECreatureControl is not a toy with three buttons, but a powerful AI system for professional applications that offers you countless options and possibilities. It is easy to use (without scripting) and can automate a lot, but ultimately it is you who determines where to go.

ICECreatureControl provides you a customized, user-friendly interface to handle all the above-mentioned features with some mouse clicks. The User Interface includes an integrated help system, which provides a help button for each control element, so you can get all required information directly in the inspector without using external document. Also ICE provides advanced Gizmos to visualize your settings in real-time.

Further information, backgrounds and solutions can be found in the comprehensive manual, on the homepage or in the Unity community forum as well.

Customers

ICECreatureControl is made for creative people, for artists as well as for programmers, for professionals but also for hobbyists.

ICECreatureControl is made for people who want more and expect more.

ICECreatureControl is made for YOU, to realize YOUR projects!

Features

  • Customizable, rule-based Behaviours

  • Missions (Outpost, Escort, Patrol)

  • Automated Perception and Targeting

  • Inventory (collect and distribute items)

  • Status (incl. vital-signs, aging etc.)

  • Realistic sensory perception

  • Multiple Target Selection

  • Dynamic Waypoint System

  • Navigation Mesh support

  • Multiplayer support

  • Objects and Environment Interactions

  • Integrated Pool Management

  • Mecanim and Legacy Animation support

  • Advanced Turret and Weapon System

  • Environment System (D/N cycle etc.)

  • Integrated Help System

  • Visual Debugging (e.g. custom gizmos)

  • Stand-alone usable

  • No scripting required (but supported)

  • Incl. Detailed Manual (100+ pages)

  • Incl. Tutorials and Demo Scenes

  • Incl. Third Party Asset Adapter

  • Compatible with Unity Free and Pro

Videos

Tutorials by TonanBora
(developer at WatreGames)

Deathmatch
(Video and Demo Scene)

http://www.icecreaturecontrol.com/files/webplayer/ICECreatureDeathmatchDemo.html

Support

*** YOU ARE NOT ALONE ***

ICECreatureControl is made to reach brilliant results without typing one single line of code but it’s also open to increase each result with your own code as desired, so the only limit will be your own creativity!

I spend countless hours to offer you a stable and feature-rich product and working hard to constantly improve it as well, but for a single person it’s a mission impossible to testing all potential combinations and it could be that of all things your favourite feature will not be working correctly, so please keep in mind that you are not alone and if you have any questions, problems or suggestions, please feel free to visit the support forum or contact me directly.

Have a great day!

Sincerely yours,
Pit

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Hey guys, I’m very pleased to announce you that ICECreatureControl is now available in the Unity Asset Store.

I’m sure you will be happy with it - have fun!

Btw. Please keep in mind that you are not alone, if you have any questions, problems or suggestions, please feel free to visit this forum or contact me directly.

Procedural Terrain Demo

Interactions

Basic Setup

Setup Wizard

Body Orientation

2 Likes

ICECreatureControl v1.1 - We’re looking for Beta Testers for the next Version!

We are constantly running beta tests of new versions of our ICECreatureControl. If you would like to help us develop this software, please apply as a beta tester.

Our testers will get access to exclusive early versions of ICECreatureControl. In return, we ask them to provide feedback and bug reports. If you feel up to the task, please send an e-mail to support@ice-technologies.com

there is fish on the picture, can this be used for fishes? if so, can I be a beta tester?

the demo is pretty good, it said 80 creatures at 60 fps, but many of them wasn’t moving.
also, would like to read more about the missions, settings, etc.
looks like a lot of work went into this.

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hi dibdab, birds and fishs will be supported with the next update and if you want, you are welcome to be a beta tester, that’s great for us. please send us a mail. the performance is really good, we do some benchmark tests with nearly 1300 characters but just for testing, that’s not practicable in a real project scenario.

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ICECreatureControl is made to work with each kind of character and to provide a maximum of creative freedoms and technical combinations, so the settings for a complex behaviour can be extensive but the fundamental principle is absolutely simple and easy to learn. you will see.

Im really enjoying this so far. Im having trouble with my rigid body creatures though. Whats the best way to use collision so they avoid? I dont want to make everything in my level a rigidbody, should they be able to use regular mesh or object collision without it?
Also, sometime they pop into the air and spin off into the sky…could easilybbe my setup. hopefully there is an example rigid body, im away from the office and cant check.
Very cool AI! I like the easy access controls and easy setup.

hi headtrip, basically, each moveable object in your scene should have a Rigidbody and especially if it has also a collider to detect collisions. Without Rigidbody Unity’s physics engine assumes that an object is static and static (immovable) objects should consequently not have collisions with other static (immovable) objects and therefore Unity will not testing collision between such supposed static objects, which means, that at least one of the colliding objects must have a Rigidbody additional to a collider, otherwise collisions will not detected.

The problem you describes based on your Rigidbody settings. Please deactivate ‘Use Gravity’ and activate ‘Is Kinematic” open the Constraints and Freeze the Rotations.

If Kinematic is off, the movements of your creature will be affected by ICECreatureControl and the physical forces of the engine at the same time. btw. if your creature don’t need collisions, you could remove the Rigidbody and also the collider.

Hi guys, to provide you a better support we have launched an additional service website where you can find further information about ICECreatureControl, such as frequently ask question, a news blog, the latest documentation and the version history, furthermore you will find there several examples and tutorials and the bug tracking system.

http://icecreaturecontrol.ice-technologies.de/

We hope you are absolutely satisfied with ICECreatureControl and you enjoy working with it.

Hi HeadTrip, additional to my last answer here some more details … By using Rigidbody and Collider to detect collisions, your creature will be handled as a closed, impenetrable unit, which requires sufficient space on the ground. If this free space is not given, because your creature comes in contact with other colliders the influencing forces will push your creature in a physically possible position. Depending on the physical forces and settings, such as mass, gravity or the physical material settings as well, your creature will lift off. You can see this phenomenon predominant if have a large number of creatures in a cramped scope or a spatial constriction.

You could reduce the size of the collider, to minimize the required space. If this is not directly possible, because of using a mesh collider, you could use the convex collider from the mesh as a trigger to detect impacts and an additional, adaptable collider to handle the collisions.

Basically ICECreatureControl doesn’t need a Collider or Rigidbody to handle the movement, so if visual intersections with other objects are acceptable for the gameplay (e.g. your creature is just a supporting actor and will not be in the focus of the player or you have dozens of creatures in a crowd and nobody could see details etc.) you could remove the Rigidbody completely and if your creature also don’t need any kind of interactions you could remove the collider as well.

Here also an example of useable settings for the rigidbody, at which the best settings for your creature will be dependent of the situation and the desired goals (e.g. if your creature is running on a slippery surface, the Kinematic flag could be off to use the slide effect …). The pictured settings will deactive all physical effects.

It looks really promising, I’m looking at getting this asset, but just have some questions.

How would this asset work with aggressive NPCs?

Do NPCs get hearing and peripheral vision within your asset?

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Additional to the standard situations defined in the home and mission settings, you can teach your creature to interact with several other objects in your scene, such as the Player Character, other NPCs and Bots, doors and hatches, melee weapons etc. The Interaction Settings provides you to design complex interaction scenarios with each object in your scene.

To using the interaction system you have to add one or more Interactors. An Interactor represents another GameObject as potential Target for your creature and contains a set of conditions and instructions to define the desired behaviour during a meeting. By default interactors are neutral, they could be best friends or deadly enemies as well and basically interactors can be everything your creature has to interact with it, such as a football your creature has to play with it or a door, which it has to destroy.

Further information you will find in the manual and product documentation (chapter 9 – Interaction), which is publicly available here: http://www.ice-technologies.de/unity/ICECreatureControl/ICECreatureControlManual.pdf

By default you creature will sense its environment in a radius of 360 degrees, but you can restrict this by define the desired Field Of View. This will simulate a kind of peripheral vision in the current version, a full support of hearing and peripheral vision will be integrated in the next update.

I hope my answers are helpful to you and please feel free to contact me if you have further questions.

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Launched a demo. AI looks pretty bad

Hi Gua,
thanks for your posting, you are absolutely right, the settings of the attendant dog are unflattering. It’s my fault, I do the demo within some minutes just to demonstrate how ICECreatureControl works with UniStrom and UFPS. But you are absolutely right, I’ll directly improve the behaviours of the animals and update the demo. Thanks a lot.

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If I use this with UFPS can I have the animal attack me and will it let me kill the animals

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Hi dustinwloring1988!
Yes, the animals can attack your UFPS Player and he can also kill the animals.

Simply open the Interaction Settings of ICECreatureControl, add your UFPS Player as Interactor and define the desired attack behaviour, so that your creature can sense, hunt and attack your Player. To hurt and kill your creature, simply add the ICECreatureUFPSAdapter in addition to ICECreatureControl to your creature and define the desired impact behaviour and the influence of the impact. That’s all!


ICECreatureUFPSAdapter is part of the ICECreatureControl package.

Hi icetec,

Any chance of a Dropbox mirror for your web demos? Been loading the “Hunter” demo for almost an hour and it’s barely 20% loaded.

Hi lod3,
that’s a good idea, I have done it directly …
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/cykt8linjy5rs18/AABnphmPmBu11QlourOp0W1Ia?dl=0

Hi guys, to provide you a better support we have launched an additional service website where you can find further information about ICECreatureControl, such as frequently ask question, a news blog, the latest documentation and the version history, furthermore you will find there several examples and tutorials and the bug tracking system.

http://icecreaturecontrol.ice-technologies.de/

We hope you are absolutely satisfied with ICECreatureControl and enjoy working with it.

Dear Customers, I am pleased to announce that an update of the ICECreatureUFPSAdapter is available now. The new version allows your creature to wound the UFPS Player during a short-range attack without additional scripts and trigger, quite simply by defining the desired attack behaviour and the in-fighting range of the creature.

ice-technologies.de/unity/ICECreatureControl/Adapter/ICECreatureAdapter.unitypackage

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