Re: Ideas for an AI scheme

Ryan Juckett wrote:
>
> Given that you mention building a "composite behavior" from the tree, 
> I'm assuming you are looking to build a concurrent hierarchical finite 
> state machine rather than a standard HFSM. In a concurrent HFSM, a 
> node in the tree might have multiple active child states running at once.
>
To be honest, I hadn't got much further than the design I originally 
suggested (well, I have a few more diagrams this end). By "composite 
behaviour" I guess I effectively meant branch nodes in a behaviour tree. 
I'd realised there were going to be some concurrency issues involved 
when I got round to building the behaviour trees, but I hadn't really 
come across the idea of a concurrent HFSM. I think it possibly sounds a 
little over my head at this point :), but it does seem an interesting 
approach. Are you thinking that a standard HFSM won't be ideal for what 
I'm trying to do though? I'm trying to come up with something I can do 
in the time really (I'm writing up a PhD thesis at the same time and 
trying to get the game up and running so I can use it as a demo for job 
interviews among other things, although I ideally also want it to be 
quite flexible).
>
> I've used concurrent HFSMs on multiple titles in the past. The 
> heaviest use of the system was from a third person shooter. The 
> ability to reuse and combine small sub-states to create more 
> complicated behavior proved very useful. For example, different 
> behaviors of moving, aiming, and reloading could all be built 
> separately and then mixed and matched based on higher level 
> transitions (e.g. on a vehicle, hiding in cover, fighting from cover). 
> It was also fairly easy to append new concurrent behaviors onto an agent.
>
> There were two main downsides to the system that I recall. The first 
> was related to the complexity of it all. In a non-concurrent system, 
> you are only in a single branch at any given time. This makes it much 
> easier to visualize what is happening in the agent as well as debug 
> how you got to a given state. It is also a bit easier to grasp the 
> behavior design in a non-concurrent system. By the end we had ambient 
> animals, enemies, scripted allies, vehicles, bosses, and so on all 
> able to start mixing and matching these behavior building blocks. It 
> wasn't that fun to digest.
>
> The second issue was related to different concurrent behaviors 
> fighting for control of a similar feature (e.g. movement). When new 
> features are added, it is easy for conflicts to crop up which require 
> messing with the hierarchy a bunch to work out. To alleviate this 
> nightmare, we ended up supporting multiple "requests" to different 
> systems. For example, if one behavior was telling an agent to move 
> towards cover and then another behavior was telling him to evade an 
> incoming vehicle, the commands from the vehicle evasion could be set 
> as a higher priority. I don't think this is the best solution, but it 
> was much more successful in creating a stable game on schedule than 
> trying to constantly rework the hierarchy.
>
> As for editing the state machines, it was all in the custom scripting 
> language used by the rest of the game. Having a graphical interface 
> would have been great, but the priority of it never worked its way 
> high enough up the todo list. The states were basically just data 
> structures (similar to the XML approach you suggest but probably much 
> less verbose with syntax). At least 99% of the transitions and states 
> were written in C++ for performance reasons although we did support 
> scripted ones.
>
> If you are doing a smaller indie game, I think it would be fine to 
> text edit stuff and the system as a whole should work. As for doing a 
> very large scale big budget game, I'd definitely weigh all your 
> options. I've since become a fan of systems where the transitions were 
> automatically generated for lower level AI behavior - something like a 
> goal/action approach.
Automatically-generated transitions sound interesting - any useful links 
by any chance? (I tried Googling for "fsm automatic transition 
generation goal action" but got a load of stuff on automatic code 
generation instead unfortunately...)

Cheers,
Stu
>  - Ryan
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