help in choosing a visual scripting asset

[vxv]

Hi all !

Can you please share in few words what visual scripting tool should I use in Unity based on my skills ?
Skills are: I have good understanding of behaviour/flow trees and can read code pretty easy.


From my researches I found best would be: behavior designer / node canvas and/or flow canvas / bolt
If there are others more suited, please tell me (Playmaker I allready studied it but it does not fit me very good: I need something more intuitive).

I wouldn't like work on one a lot and then have to switch the behaviours to other so I would appreciate some experienced users that tried more of the above/others.

Also, becasue I use Invector like you all, I think that would be the best spot to ask this 

[magique]

I have Behavior Designer, Playmaker, and Flow Canvas. I find your evaluation of Playmaker a bit odd. I've worked with Playmaker and Behavior Designer a bit and Playmaker is far more intuitive than Behavior Designer. To me, they solve different problems. Playmaker is great for creating game triggers, enhancing game object behaviors, etc. Behavior Designer is better for pure AI. For example, I would use Playmaker for having a player enter a trigger and causing a sound and a particle effect to play or cause a trap to activate or open a door, etc. You wouldn't do that with Behavior Designer in my opinion. Although it might technically be possible. The flow of Behavior Designer sometimes eludes me as I find the Selectors and Conditional Aborts very confusing.

I also have Flow Canvas, but have barely tried it so far. It seems more like a Playmaker replacement than something you'd write AI for. It is very similar to writing code in some respects and takes more of a programmer's mentality to use I think.

[shadex]

Jul 2, 2018 18:16:18 GMT vxv said:

Hi all !

Can you please share in few words what visual scripting tool should I use in Unity based on my skills ?
Skills are: I have good understanding of behaviour/flow trees and can read code pretty easy.


From my researches I found best would be: behavior designer / node canvas and/or flow canvas / bolt
If there are others more suited, please tell me (Playmaker I allready studied it but it does not fit me very good: I need something more intuitive).

I wouldn't like work on one a lot and then have to switch the behaviours to other so I would appreciate some experienced users that tried more of the above/others.

Also, becasue I use Invector like you all, I think that would be the best spot to ask this 

Invector AI / The Animator / State Machine Behavior. I've worked with Behavior Designer, and it's about the same as invector AI's, except Invector AI works out of the box, and you'll be familiar with the code anyways.

As far as Playmaker and Node Canvas, Once you get passed the free Trigger code, your pretty much going to be stuck writing out code snippets and coding actions. I found i spent more time learning the system then it took me to just learn how to code whatever i was trying to do in the first place.

Now as far as bang for your buck, Learning the animator, especially if your not strong at coding (or even brand new) is about the best thing you can do IMHO. I can be used as a FSM like play maker. You just need to learn conditions and transitions, similar to how play maker does it. Then if you learn State Machine Behavior (pretty similar to OnCollision), which is really simple, efficient and is great for little snippets of code, you can easily mod the animator. You'll also learn how to code without realizing it. The other thing is the knowledge your going to need anyways, as your not going to have a game without an animator.

If your planning on relying on playmaker or node canvas to make your game, don't. The only way they are powerful enough to actually make a game is by coding tons of new actions. Most people quit playmaker and just learn enough basic coding to get by.

[magique]

I would agree that Invector AI is a really great system even in beta. However, comparing performance to Behavior Designer it falls short. In my tests I was able to get the same number of AI running with BD at double the frame rate of Invector AI. My test was with 512 AI wandering around the scene. Now, depending on your target platform the difference may not be noticeable to you, but for me it was critical.

[shadex]

Nov 10, 2018 15:16:11 GMT magique said:

I would agree that Invector AI is a really great system even in beta. However, comparing performance to Behavior Designer it falls short. In my tests I was able to get the same number of AI running with BD at double the frame rate of Invector AI. My test was with 512 AI wandering around the scene. Now, depending on your target platform the difference may not be noticeable to you, but for me it was critical.

See i'm stunned you got those results. My tests where completely differn't. I could run about 20 BD AI's at 60 FPS, and about 100 on invector, both using the pretty much the same logic (invector damage, ability to strafe, equip a weapon in the inventory, sense detection, Dynamic Attack System). BD for us, was a lot like ICE creature control, where the demo had the 50v50 solider's, but making an actual decent working AI would slow it to a crawl. Only time it out preformed invector, was when making an incredibly simplistic AI (like just run and attack) or and incredibly advanced AI and you wanted BD's formations and other packs. Actually Invector was the only one i could get a true 50v50 battle with a fully setup AI (not the default demo optimized stuff both packs give).

So whats your target platform, and AI capability's? Ours was PC and the AI could do everything the old AI could do + formations, a node based group attack system and mirrored circle strafe, cast a spell at X range, enter instantiations into a pooling system. Both were melee focused.

[magique]

I just had them wandering around in both cases for my tests. So BD wandered and Invector patrolled random waypoints to get a wander behavior. My target platform is Wii U, but I was testing on the PC with this.