Finishing our production-ready Behavior Tree system (Part 2) in Unity C# - Game AI Mastery Part 7

[@zeusgameassets]

Watch the next episode where we finally get to create our first behavior trees, we also add turning and looking at stuff and speech bubbles: kzbin.info/www/bejne/joO4oZt_jttjjs0

[@lep11s]

amazing as always keep it up

[@WhisperCanvas]

thanks man

[@lep11s]

Great video and explanation, thank you brother

[@zeusgameassets]

Glad you like it, thank you for watching.

[@TrentSterling]

Are these releases getting more rapid? I love this series! Blackboards are a badass technique for npcs

[@youssefkhaled412]

Amazing content as always! I believe sooner than later you'll gain many many more subscribers, you deserve it. Also, I have a question: is this series building up to be general game AI tutorials, or are you planning to integrate all this into one game as you go along? And if it's the latter, do you have a plan on what kind of game it's going to be? Keep up the great work!

[@zeusgameassets]

Thank you for watching and for your nice comment! As for your question, it's kind of both. In each video we're developing the same project, adding more features and AI behaviors to it. I plan on turning it into a mix of GTA, Hitman, and Cyberpunk, a big world where you can find lots of different NPCs, some friendly, some not. These videos are not devlogs for an upcoming game, the purpose is to teach how to make a full game with AI behaviors, and the purpose of the game is to serve as a real-world example for this course. So I plan to teach everything I do in making this game, all the videos are inter-connected and meant to be watched in order. There are lots of standalone tutorials here on KZbin covering particular aspects of AI programming, I'm doing it differently in order to show how to overcome some challenges when it comes to organizing a project like this. It's rather easy to create a navmesh agent that goes from A to B, but if you have a game with 100 different NPCs, each with different systems clashing with each other, it can become very challenging to maintain your code and add more features, this is the angle I'm taking here for this series (perhaps I should start calling it course, rather than tutorial series).

[@youssefkhaled412]

@@zeusgameassets Wow! That's an insane level of quality, man. Does that also mean that you'll eventually implement other gameplay features that aren't necessarily AI-centric? (Like RPG elements for example) Also, thank you for the thorough reply, I truly appreciate it!

[@zeusgameassets]

@@youssefkhaled412 And thank you for your feedback and interesting questions. About non-AI mechanics, yes I have and will implement them, but not to the full extent of a finished product. For example, I already made a third-person controller for the player, it's good enough to get the point (player interaction with formations and other npcs, etc) but I don't plan on adding things like jumping, falling, etc, at least not right now, only when needed to illustrate something related to AI. I'm currently inching towards a combat system, I'm going to implement a health system and a gun, and again it will be quite basic, for example, the gun will have a limited magazine and automatic firing, which will be an opportunity to learn how an AI character can reload a gun when empty while in combat, however, I will not implement different types of guns, with different firing modes etc. Perhaps I can have one example of a melee weapon, one example of a grenade, and such. If viewers want more in-depth tutorials on these systems there are lots of youtube content for that, and I'll probably make tutorial on more systems as well, but for this course, it's 100% about and around game AI and NPCs. If you have more feedback/questions don't hesitate, thanks!

[@consultingprestig2096]

Hi, thank you for your very informative tutorial. However I can't keep up with the Wander.cs scripts and I have errors in other scripts regarding OnEntry and other functions you added when you dealt with the NPCSystem. Are these two parts outside of the NPCSystem parts? Could you tell me if there are any adjustments I need to make myself? I'm a little lost ^^ Thanks in advance for your answer

[@zeusgameassets]

Hey there, It's great that you're following along and writing your own code, but I'm afraid I don't understand your issue, you'll have to be more specific. Here's what you can do: I published the code for these episodes here: zeusgameassets.itch.io/ai-mastery-series-in-unity-csharp, you can review the code and compare with your own, then if you have any specific issues or questions, I'll be happy to help.

[@consultingprestig2096]

@@zeusgameassets Great, thank you very much for your response. Yes indeed I just noticed that we could download the files I can finally compare all that. Thank you very much indeed I am writing at the same time as you in the video it allows me to record certain methods and habits to have when writing code on Unity in particular because frankly your tutorial far exceeds certain tutorials which do things quite well. simple. I really like your approach!

[@consultingprestig2096]

PS: Small question in passing: We live in an AI environment, can we program AI behavior with a classification neural network for example or even with GPT which could allow us to have fairly realistic exchanges depending on what we ask him whether in writing or even vocally. Do you think you could do a tutorial along these lines? Thanks in advance

[@zeusgameassets]

@@consultingprestig2096 Thank you I'm glad you like the tutorials, and what you're doing is great, following along and trying to solve the problems on your own, and learning my way of doing it so you can integrate it with your own coding style and come out with something perhaps even better than what I teach. As for your question: yes you can use machine learning and GPTs to create more realistic and reactive NPCs, I recently watched a video on that, I don't remember the name, but you can type "using gpt in Unity to create NPCs" or something along those lines in the youtube search bar. However, this approach is far more complex than what we're doing in these series, we're following the path of indie and AAA games and how they designed game AI for years up to this point, and it's much simpler to make, understand and improve on. Perhaps in the near future there would be tools available to easily use machine learning and generative AI in game projects, but right now, if you want to make a game and finish it in a reasonable timeframe, then I would advise you steer clear of generative AI or neural networks/machine learning for NPC behaviors, you can discover them on the side if you're curious, but for gamedev production, it adds too much complexity to be of any use. That's only my opinion. However, for code assistance, ChatGPT is very useful and I would recommend using it in that regard, I do and it takes care of so much grunt work, it's like having your own programming team without the downsides.

[@zeusgameassets]

@@consultingprestig2096 Actually your question was specifically about talking to NPCs either vocally or by text, then yes, I saw a video where there was a Skyrim mod that adds ChatGPT to NPCs, but it just controls what they say, not their actions. It can be an interesting addition, for example, you could inform the GPT of the lore of your game, and let it talk to the player. This is great if you want to do it in that limited capacity.

[@denver_8397]

consider moving it to ECS?

[@zeusgameassets]

Sure ECS offers a lot of flexibility and scalability, it's a different way of programming and thinking about your code. For most cases, you're making games with a few dozens NPCs, maybe some enemies and some friendlies, so for most games made with Unity, you'd want to use Monobehaviours, because that's what most developers are familiar with. You'd have to consider that maybe at some point you want to hire people to work with you, or you already have a team, and the probability that you or your teammates are familiar with ECS is low. I'm not talking about you personally, I'm talking about the probability that you, the viewer, watching my tutorials, would know about ECS. Also, if you want to use some ready-made gameplay systems from the asset store, the probability that they support or even were made for ECS is very low at the moment. So unless you're making a Total War-like game in Unity, you don't need ECS. So my answer is: not right now, maybe in a different tutorial series. But overall you're right, the developers of Behavior Designer are supporting ECS in their upcoming new version, so the Unity dev community is definitely going in that direction.