silver silo
Does anyone have recommendations for AI solutions that are designer-friendly (= highly configurable in the editor without programming knowledge) and that integrate well with ECS?
I'm especially looking for implementations that allow non-programmer designers to author quasi-scripted behaviors (like HTNs or BT sequences), so Utility AI and GOAP are lower on my list.
twin oxide
I wrote our Ai on my graph package https://github.com/tertle/com.bovinelabs.grove
This was actually extremely beneficial for this library as I got so much feedback from designers
99% of designer configuration is just done via the instance values https://github.com/tertle/com.bovinelabs.grove?tab=readme-ov-file#setting-up-instance-values which allows overriding values on the graph per entity
But yeah this isn't an Ai solution, just the tools to make one yourself. You can implement pretty much any logic in this package, in theory you could visual code your whole game but it'd be a dumb idea - it's not designed for that.
opaque thistle
Not a real AI tool either, more a visual scripting base, but maybe also usable for AI
https://github.com/Pontoco/Lattice
silver silo
thanks, these look pretty interesting!
lavish cedar
I'm assuming you are referring to only the decision making part of AI. As typically AI is made up of multiple different systems. First thing that comes to mind that I've seen is https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/visual-scripting/behavior-designer-pro-dots-powered-behavior-trees-298743
Utility AI wise. You have this which doesn't exist yet but should be coming soon. https://discussions.unity.com/t/wip-utility-intelligence-dots-ecs-utility-ai-framework/1563806
Another package that I'm not sure how designer friendly it is but it is an option. https://gitlab.com/lclemens/lightweightdotsutilityai
silver silo
I'm assuming you are referring to only the decision making part of AI. As typica...
ideally i'm looking for something that would have the decision making system implemented, and also be able to read and write component field values from the graph, so that a programmer isn't needed to write graph adapters for everything
silver silo
behavior designer pro looks pretty cool especially since it allows combining utility ai with bts but custom ecs integrations seem to require a gargantuan amount of boilerplate (based on https://opsive.com/support/documentation/behavior-designer-pro/new-tasks/entity-task/)
and lattice looks really cool as well but unfortunately doesn't support AOT which i need
lavish cedar
I would probably look at something like Grove then where you can build your own components that the designers can just rearrange to their liking.
lavish cedar
One of the systems I mentioned just came out. https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/behavior-ai/utility-intelligence-ecs-utility-ai-framework-for-dots-316295
silver silo
ended up making my own proof-of-concept behavior tree over the weekend using the new graph toolkit preview, that was a fun exercise
got usage down to a pretty neat system, the graph reads and writes component types directly and the types' stable type hashes get baked into the graph blob asset, then at runtime i construct per-graph queries and dependencies; to expose a component to the graph all you need is one stub node class definition (this is a limitation of the current graph toolkit version but i think they're working on lifting that limitation)
the graph toolkit is unfortunately still pretty buggy, lots of cases where i'm editing a graph and it just throws an exception somewhere from the internals and doesn't do what i want it to
twin oxide
yep, it's way buggy but more problematically, very limited in its capabilities
i was excited to swap my graph package over to it but unfortunately haven't been
great looking little system though
silver silo
apparently they also embedded the graph toolkit into the editor in 6.4 so no more patching for that