Behavior Designer - Formations Pack

Behavior Designer - Formations Pack
Available on the Asset Store


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Requires Behavior Designer

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The Behavior Designer - Formations Pack contains 14 different behaviour tree tasks focused on group formations with Unity's NavMesh or Apex Path.

Agents can join and leave the formation at any time. The formation will dynamically respond to changes.

The Formations Pack is integrated with the Third Person Controller allowing for movement with mecanim's root motion. It is also integrated with the Deathmatch AI Kit.

Each task is well commented and written in a generic and clean way making it very easy to integrate into your own project. This pack will continue to grow as we hear new task suggestions from the community.

The following tasks are included:

• Column
• Row
• Grid
• Line
• Echelon
• Wedge
• V
• Arc
• Skirmisher
• Swarm
• Diamond
• Triangle
• Square
• Circle

Web Demo
Documentation​

 

Awesome.

 

is this possible "auto battle system" by using this asset?

 

Appreciate it!

Can you expand on what you mean by auto battle system?

 

Auto Battle is just Auto Battle I mean.. AI VS AI .. player select auto mode so player can watch AI VS AI

I think blue team is fighting against red team

 

This is an addon pack for Behavior Designer, which is a behavior tree implementation. You can definitely create a behavior tree which has the AI reacting to other AI agents. You can then use this addon pack to have your AI agents create a formation as it is battling the other agents.

If you haven't heard of behavior trees before, they are an extremely powerful and flexible way of creating your AI. In fact, major AAA studios use behavior trees for their AI. Here is a general overview of what a behavior tree is, and Gamasutra has a great article on the details for how a behavior tree works here.

 

thank you for quick reply.. I am very interested.. I am making mobile game.. so performance are important
To be honest, I Bought visual scripting tools but I was very disappointed with the performance

However, a visual script is very convenient and the future

I want to easily implement an automatic battle

if I make 8(AI) vs 8(AI) battle by using Behavior Designer.. Can I have good performance as a mobile game?

I think all Visual scripting tool is easy to use.. but only problem is performance... as mobile game developer.. if If is possible to develop mobile rpg with good performance.. I always will be a fan of the product

 

You won't have a problem with performance. Here is a test that I did to see how many trees could run at the same time. Granted this was on a desktop machine but it took thousands of behavior trees to start seeing an impact. 16 agents on mobile should be fine. Traversing the Behavior Designer trees is extremely quick thanks to the data oriented design. If you do notice a slowdown it is most likely because of an actual tasks rather than the core behavior tree traversal. For example if you have task which does a GetComponent many times within the same update loop you'll notice a slowdown, but you would have noticed that same slowdown with a regular MonoBehaviour object as well.

 

WoW.. You are great! I am Very lucky

I will buy the products in the near future


I has bought three of the most popular products

one is too slow So I did not even ask to developer about mobile performance

another was not made for the mobile game development(developer said)

the other visual script deverloper did not have any answer to my question

But you answered friendly and confident

I felt a sense of trust


I said before,

There are a lot of Visual Script Asset

The advantage is easy. Disadvantage is too slow

But your approach seems different

you consider the performance of mobile games

I believe this is a major difference and advantage for your asset

thank you very much

 

I'm subscribing to this thread.

 

The Formation Pack hasn't been approved yet but I got a question about the performance of the Formations Pack with hundreds of units. Here's the profiler for 200 units in column formation:



This was profiled on a desktop built in mid-2011 (3.4 GHz hyper threaded quad core). The most amount of time is spent in WaitForTargetFPS which means there isn't anything causing a bottleneck. CrowdManager.Update is from Unity's NavMesh implementation and manages the pathfinding for all 200 NavMeshAgents. BehaviorManager.Update is from Behavior Designer and runs the behavior trees on all of the agents.

 

Want to pick this up, subscribing!

 

I prefer if without need for behavior designer.

 

As a general update I am still waiting to hear back from the Asset Store team. The Formations Pack is still in "Pending Review" status.. the Asset Store team must have a backlog of assets to go through.

@imtrobin -

While the math behind each formation is general and can be used for MonoBehaviour, the rest of the structure is specific to Behavior Designer.

 

I am going to get this. Simple as that.

 

If two units battle Based on the formation like RTS. I would not hesitate to purchase this asset

I want to see red team vs blue team battle

 

The Formations Pack just includes a set of tasks for creating different formations. It doesn't include any tasks that do the actual attacking. For this you can use behavior trees to determine when/if the agent should attack as well as the attack method.

The nice thing about these formation tasks is that agents can join or leave the formation at any time. This is great for example if you have one agent that is moving in formation and then spots an enemy and wants to attack. What you can even do is have a small group of agents split from the larger formation and create their own formation. This smaller formation can then go and attack the enemy while the larger formation continues on.

 

The Formations Pack has been approved and is now on the Asset Store!

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/28980

 

So, i can't use this pack if i've not use Unity's NavMesh?!
And why not an option that allows the group to follow a leader, no matter which system (Unity Navmesh, A* Pathfinding, Waypoint etc...) used by the leader.?

 

Other integrations are definitely coming I wanted to get it out with Unity's NavMesh first and add other integrations shortly after that. The first two integrations will definitely be the A* Pathfinding Project and Apex Path. All of the tasks inherit from the same base class so to add support for other integrations I should just need to switch out that base class.

 

Thanks.
On my buy list (as usual .)

 

i suggest to make scripts for astar that was need if we need to implement on a game on large scale,pathfinding was bad in performance
bots do not recognize the obstacle until they are really close

i have bought the pack

 

Thanks for your purchase!

A* support is definitely coming. I don't have a time estimate yet but it will be soon.

In terms of the bots not recognizing the obstacles until they are close, right now the bots try to stay in formation relative to their leader for as long as possible. This does mean that they will get really close to an obstacle before they recognize it. In the next version I may be able to add an option for you to be able to control the tradeoff between staying in formation and avoiding obstacles.

 

can you post a quick fix for the kit to make obstacle avoidance soon i need to complete project using this so

 

I still need to think of the right way to approach it so I'll need some time. Right now I'm thinking of a 0-1 range where 0 means the agent is completely following the path and avoiding obstacles and 1 means completely following the formation and only avoiding the formation when they are about to run into it. I still need to think it through a little bit more and actually try implementing it - I'll let you know as soon as I have something.

 

ok

 

@unitywlp -

I added a parameter which allows you to specify how much the agent looks ahead. This allows the agents to better avoid obstacles in front of them. You can see the results on the Formations page (the Line and Echelon tasks are good examples of this in particular). Feel free to send me a PM with your invoice number and I'll send you a link to this version.

 

A new version of the Formations Pack is now on the Asset Store. You can see the release notes here. This is mostly a bugfix release but a new lookAhead parameter has been added which allows your agents to avoid obstacles better.

Assuming there are no major bug reports, the next release will add integration with A* Pathfinding Project and Apex Path.

 

Thanks for the update.
mean while there are very less video tutorials available to understand the behaviour designer how ever i have understood but in most case i recommend making few more tutorials

 

You've seen this page which has videos for all of the major Behavior Designer topics, right? Those videos should pretty much cover how Behavior Designer works, but if you can think of any more topics that I should cover I'd be happy to hear it. These addon packs don't have videos because in general it is just add the task and hit play.

For a general behavior tree overview, take a look at this article or this topic. In the second link I go into detail with how a complete behavior tree is constructed and why the tasks are placed where they are.

 

Hi there, I wonder whether the integration with A* & Apex Path have done yet or still in developing?

 

I added Apex Path integration to the Tactical Pack but have not had a chance to do the Formations Pack yet. Dealing with A*, I was having a problem getting all of the agents to stay aligned in a group within the Tactical Pack so I shelved that for now. I'm guessing that the A* steering behaviors are implemented slightly differently then Unity's NavMesh and Apex Path.

I'll be at Unite next week but I can make it a priority to release an update with Apex Path after I get back.

 

Do these packs work in 3D space or only on a 2D plane?

 

The Formations Pack works with Unity's NavMesh which is in 3D. The Tactical Pack works with Unity's NavMesh or Apex Path so that's 3D as well. The Movement Pack works with Unity's NavMesh, Apex Path, A* Pathfinding Project, or PolyNav. The first three are 3D while the last one is 2D.

 

I have this in mind for a space type game where ship formations could exist that you could be in a sphere or whatever. What this work okay?

 

Unfortunately the Formations Pack is not able to work with a space game out of the box. True 3D pathfinding is computationally expensive and consumes much more memory then pathfinding on a plane. There aren't any pathfinding assets out on the store that are able to do true 3D pathfinding.

With that said, you have two options for a space game. One option is to fake it by placing an invisible plane that the pathfinding implementation uses. You can then adjust the y position of the spaceships with a separate height adjusting component and it'll appear that your spaceships are moving in 3D space. Looking specifically at the Formations Pack, the formations created by the tasks will assume that they are on a 2D plane. It would take some modification to adjust it to have variable y positions but I don't think that it would be any harder then getting a spaceship to pathfind in space in the first place.

The second option is to not use any pathfinding at all and instead just use basic steering behaviors. Out of all of our addon packs the Tactical Pack is the only pack that works with basic steering behaviors (so far.. I'd eventually like to add it to all of the packs). In this case you would do a simple Vector3.MoveTowards, and then use local avoidance to avoid any objects. If you chose this method then the Formations Pack would not work because it does rely on Unity's NavMesh implementation.

I hope that gives you some ideas on how to solve it!

 

Thanks for the input. I will try what you suggest and see where it can get me.

 

Hello @opsive

We would like to know if your FormationPack works with A* (from Aron Granberg)?

 

It currently does not. It is on my list to add A* support but I haven't been able to add it yet.

 

Hi
can you make playmaker actions for this plugin i have both behaviour designer and formations but i did not find a solution to use this in game to this day it was very complex to use in a game.

 

What playmaker actions would you like to see? Playmaker actions don't make as much sense for this asset because everything is self contained within the behavior tree. The Tactical Pack does have Playmaker actions but that is to allow the characters to attack using Playmaker, rather than to control the movement.

 

yea i understand but for me i want helper script to control the selected objects to formation from the playmaker i can integrate behaviour designer in project but i want to control using playmaker.

 

Can this be combined with the movement pack. Basically i'm using LeaderFollow from the movement pack but i don't want the agents to follow directly behind the leader.

 

Do you mean have the Formation agents follow a leader which uses a Movement Pack task? Yes, you can, though it takes a small modification. Take a look at this post.

 

I mean something like this? The follower isn't directly behind the leader.

 

The Leader Follow task from the Movement Pack will only follow directly behind the player. The Column task from the Formations Pack would give you a start but it has the leader within the column along with the followers. You would be able to modify this task in order to accomplish what you want, but it would take a small amount of scripting.

 

Okay, that should work. As long as they are side by side when not moving. I'm using your third person controller so they characters won't run in the same speed.

 

I'm curious about the flexibility of the formations given immobile obstacles being in the way of the desired formation shape- are they rigid or do they respond to the constraints the environment places on them? A few examples may be in order.

If I were to walk up to a mile-long wall with a big wedge formation trailing behind me, then turn so half of the "desired formation" shape is on one side of the wall and half on the other, would half of my units try to pathfind all of the way around to the other side or would the "desired formation" deform to the shape of the space that can contain it, as it would in many RTS titles?

A slightly more realistic example would be a grid shape of units that are 4 by 4 (or something) and a big boulder sitting right in the middle of the spot where the formation would like to be- would it deform the goal waypoints around the boulder?

 

In this example the shape would be formed on both sides of the wall. It does not calculate if there is enough space available to create the entire formation (though this would be a neat addition).

Yes, it will. In the web player demo there's a few formations that extend beyond the gap in the middle of the map. Before the agents hit the wall they will try to avoid it:

 

I bought the formations pack and was able to easily do what I needed to do. I just set the target transformation to the player controlled character and follow orders to the non player controlled character.

Behavior Designer has saved me so much time on AI.