RAIN Artificial Intelligence (AI) Engine v2.1 More Powerful, Still Free

Hello All!

Today we launch the latest version of RAIN, the development tools of the Sentio Platform. This version of RAIN is the most streamlined, optimized, and beautiful version to date. Even if RAIN’s looks are the first feature you notice— the massive improvements to our wiki documentation and new Getting Started tutorials will help you dig deep into everything RAIN has to offer.

Newest Tutorial Video

If you're new to RAIN. I'm Jester, Community Manager, pro kickballer, social nerd, robot pirate. I will be your magical guide to all things RAIN!

Here are some helpful links for you to get started and join the future of AI in Unity.

Download RAIN

Community Site

RAIN Tutorials and Sample Projects

Rival Theory Website

Of course, any questions you have feel free to DM me, email (best way Jester@rivaltheory.com), or post here.

Go forth and create amazing AI!

 

Very nice project, will definitly try it out

 

Thanks! Let me know what your experience is like

 

is this compatible with the 2D?

 

The pathfinding aspects of RAIN are essentially meant to be applied in a 3D environment with the normal y/up Unity axis. In a 2D game, you can still take advantage of the behavior trees, sensors, and general movement system. You can try to use waypoints, but by themselves they won't help with special events like jumping. Given this situation, I would suggest sticking to behavior and sensors in a 2D platformer.

Let me know if that helps!

 

Hello everyone! To say thank you to our amazing Unity3D community we made a video to showcase some of the incredible experiences they made.

We’re excited to see what you’re all working on! Tweet #UsingRAIN to let us know about your project and connect with other RAIN developers (make sure you add a link to your website) or apply for your very own Studio Showcase here!

 

ANNOUNCEMENT:

If you're running a version of RAIN older than 2.1.3 and you want the latest version please visit our website for your update. Even if automatic updates are enabled. We found an issue where the auto updater was saying the latest version of RAIN was installed when it really wasn't.

To check your version in Unity go to RAIN>Help>About (version number should be there).

Is it v2.1.3?
No?

Download the latest version of RAIN here

The issue has been resolved in the current version of RAIN

Post here if you have any questions, or email me jester[at]rivaltheory[dot]com

Best,
Jester

 

How come it's not on the asset store yet?

 

@jrDev It is on the asset store, just saying.

 

But this is a quite old version. It doesn't get updated. The Version is from 2013...

 

Yes, this is what I meant, the old version is on the asset store.

Thanks,
jrDev

 

We had some push and pull from the asset store about our automatic updater so we decided to work around it and we're releasing the newest version of RAIN on the asset store along with some pretty cool behavior assets you're all going to love!

 

Intro to RAIN Features Demo

Brought to you by our very own JediSolosky

This is an introductory overview of some of the most popular features of the RAIN artificial intelligence engine.

Available on Unity 3D. RAIN artificial intelligence engine helps digital entertainment developers create any type of character, for any game, on any platform.

RAIN is free! Download your full copy:

http://rivaltheory.com/rain/download/

Sample project: http://rivaltheory.com/community/tutorials/

RAIN Overview: http://rivaltheory.com/rain/

 

Great! I'll grab it when it hits the store.

Thanks,
jrDev

 

We are in the process of changing our navigation system from Unity's default pro navmesh one to something that is more flexible system which can give us run time generation of navmesh.

I was really happy to find Rain along with A* project but I was little bit disappointed when I found out that Rain does not offer dynamic generation of the navmesh "yet"

This is probably the single most important feature that many of us are looking for when choosing the navmesh system, so I am really hoping that Rain brings this particular feature very soon with high priority.

Is it possible for dev to let us know any EST for this particular feature to be available in the future?

My second question is , Rain does look very flexible AI system based on BT , my past experience of using BT was that it trades off that flexibility with performance. So if I want to have say 100s of characters for say.. RTS game, performance hit was too much to be realistically be able to use them in the production. I have not seen any performance related articles or videos, so what can you tell us about it?

Thanks for your wonderful efforts!

 

Looks very impressive. Will definitely give this a try in my project.

 

I like so much this project, let me try and back to say my experience. very good proyect.

 

Teaser: Available soon on the Unity Asset Store.

Every piece of this asset will be reusable in your own project.

Squad Command: Advanced Warfighter AI

Let us know you think!

Project was made possible by #UsingRAIN
Download your free copy of RAIN:

http://rivaltheory.com/rain/download/

Sample RAIN project: http://rivaltheory.com/community/tutorials/

RAIN Overview:

 

Thank you so much for your kind words! I have no idea how I missed this post! It is possible to generate a nav mesh at runtime with RAIN! It's not completely obvious so we are putting together some code/examples for you to start with.

As for performance, our BT system is very lightweight and we have a video that shows off a big battle scene with some fairly complex BTs. End of the video

As for the 100s of AI on the screen at one time, there is going to be a lot of variables to take into consideration. I would use RAIN to provide the behavior but there are a lot more optimizations you can make (models, physics) before AI is even considered. If your BTs are not overly complex you should be just fine.

If you have specific questions please let me know.

Best,
Jester

 

It's good to know that Rain can generate nav mesh at run time. I would love to check out the example to do this, once you are ready , Jester.

 

We're working on updating a section on the wiki to show this and also creating a forum thread to talk about its use. I will post here when it's all ready!

 

Here's the link! http://rivaltheory.com/wiki/rainelements/navmeshrig

Let me know if you have any issues!

 

Does the framework support dynamic obstacles ?

EDIT: This is from the same question in reddit thread, so is answered.

"Dynamic obstacle avoidance is slated for a future release. We want to make sure we nail down this feature completely before we release it."

 

Squad Command: Advanced Warfighter AI is now available!

http://bit.ly/SCAWAI

Let us know what you think!

 

This tool is incredible . I have been usng it today and is full of options and works amazingly well. The mesh generation is stellar too.

 

Thanks so much! Let us know how your experience is going. We'd be excited to see the progress on your project!

 

Thanks, i will update when i have a first implementation, now i am playing with it and see how i can best integrate with ORK Framework event system.

I simply love the fact that you have such an expansive system that covers so many aspects, like behavior trees, sensing etc, after lots of searching seems that this is the best way to go to reduce complexity and keep all in one place as much as possible in my project.

Keep up the amazing work

 

Ok, cool, it's bit late reply but I will do the test with run time nav mesh generator.

However, I have one more question.

In my system, I need to move my AI using the very root game object of the character and I have legacy animation system where lower body animates separately from upper animation. They have different animation needs , as lower body needs to animate according to the moving direction and speed , and the upper body needs to rotate and animate separately from the overall moving direction of the AI. Meaning, upper body is going to look where the AI is "looking" while moving in some direction not necessary the same direction as movement. I have already done this, and I am not asking RAIN to handle it, but I need to do separate animation state for upper body and run different one for lower body.

I can see that there is "custom animator" but when I click on it, it doesn't really show much..

http://rivaltheory.com/wiki/customization/customanimator

Where can I get more information?

 

Is there (or will there be) an actual gameplay demo for the Warfighter AI? Thank you

 

Thank you so much for your support! Let us know if there is anything we can help with!

 

I was talking to my development team about this and I think we can solve the problem relatively easily depending on how the animations are set up.

I think this topic would be best tackled on our RAIN forums so others can see/join in.

http://rivaltheory.com/forums/

I'll look for your post directly or just send a link and we will get on it as soon as possible. Let me know if you have any issues!

Best,
Jester

 

Yes, we are working on a playable demo now. I will post here (and other places) when it's available!

Thanks for asking!

-Jester

 

We want to showcase your VR games!

We're putting together a page to show off all the VR-enabled games using RAIN.



Join the ranks of SUPERHOT, Among the Sleep, Zombie VR, GRAVE, Spirited Away, and many more!

Contact us to get started (media@rivaltheory.com), tweet #UsingRAIN in your twitter message, or simply post here.

If you want your project featured in our VR Showcase, we'll need the following information:

A brief description of your game
Link to your website
Demo download (if available)

Let me know if you have any questions!

Best,
Jester

 

Is it possible to use RAIN to make a vehicle enemy AI similar to the one in the game Indestructible? Basically the bot cars follow you around but don't really drive directly at you... i.e. they don't try to ram you; they usually drive past you and drive wide circles around you while trying to get a bead on you and shoot you. They also back up when they hit a wall.

Here's some example gameplay of the sort of enemy AI I'm talking about:

Thanks!

 

[DEMO Released] A demo for Squad Command: Advanced Warfighter AI pack was released.

Click here for the Demo

This project was created #UsingRAIN

 

[Code Sample]

Hello eridani,

I waited to post something until I had a solution for you. Our fearless leader Prime put together a custom motor that lets us control vehicles in RAIN.

Check out the thread here

Let me know if this helps! Talk to you soon.

Best,
Jester

 

Thank you so much Jester and Prime! I checked out the code samples and the new demo and am reeeeeally close to buying this asset, but first I wanted to ask you about some concerns I saw in the demo:

1. Is it easy to set up random patrols for the enemy AI, or do I always have to mark carefully pre-determined patrol paths with waypoints.

2. Is the "take cover" command dependent on pre-appointed cover positions? In other words, it's not a dynamic system where I can tell my comrades to take cover and they will find the nearest convenient cover between their present location and the enemy, but instead they will run back to the closest pre-appointed cover position.

3. After the enemy AI kills my comrades, and I am observing from far away, they just stand over the bodies, or occasionally run back and forth a short distance before stopping again. Is there a setting to make them keep looking for me after a firefight for a short period, and then start wandering? (or only at that point standing around)

4. When a few of the enemy are standing around close to each other, and I shoot and kill one of them, the others just stand there and don't react at all. Is there a way for them to start looking for me if another enemy is killed or shot near them? Or if they detect shots fired at them that don't actually hit them.

5. The enemy AI seems to enjoy pointing their rifles straight up in the air as they stand around. It would look a lot better if they just kept their rifle held low during idle.

Overall the AI is very impressive and seems to work well "out of the box" (I'm assuming the demo doesn't have all kinds of customizations added and is representative of actual performance). Well done guys!!

 

Yes it's really easy to set up random patrols, all you have to do is determine where you want your AI to move around, set some waypoints down, and set up your behavior tree to randomly select a waypoint. It should take no time at all, especially if you buy the package because 90% of the work is done for you.

There are predetermined "tactical positions" in the scene that the AI use for cover-- which you can customize. Yes, the AI will choose the nearest convenient cover between their present location and the enemy.

There is a way to tweak their behavior to what you're talking about in the behavior tree. If the AI had not seen you at all they would not know to search for you. The AI will look for you if you break line of sight by going to the last spot they detected you.

This is interesting. We designed the AI communication system to handle a few different situations. If one AI gets shot, all the AI go on alert. With that said, not all the AI are going to do the exact same thing. We designed the different soldier classes to react differently.

I have not seen this behavior but we will look into it. There was a few bug fixes that went into the newest version so check out the demo and let us know what you think.

Thanks for the kind words! We built Squad Command so that every piece of this package can be reused for your own game.

Let me know if you have any more questions, I'll be happy to answer them!

Talk to you soon!
--Jester

 

Thanks for the reply Jester. Some more followup points... apologies if you think I am nitpicking, because I most certainly am! I just think your AI is *almost* realistic and not as "gamey" as other AI, so I want to see if it can be pushed and tweaked further.

I guess I was asking if there was a way to set up a truly random wander where I don't have to place any waypoints at all, and the AI will move in a random way while still avoiding obstacles (think of a deer in a forest, or a cow grazing on a pasture, or an aimless zombie).

So there is no dynamic cover, where the AI will "look" for cover on its own without me having to place cover waypoints...

Here's an interesting take on dynamic cover by the "Shooter AI" asset (admittedly it does not work perfectly at this time but the idea itself is interesting): "The cover system was designed to cope with dynamic environments so that you can make the level dynamically change in game, with the AI adapting to it. ...the AI first shoots a specified number of rays into a field of view (i saw that 360 degrees made the most realistic results, as us humans have very good spacial awareness, even behind us), and checks whether any of them hit anything. Any ray that hits something gets a second ray starting from that point, that goes to the object that we're trying to hide from. Any ray that gets a hit between those 2 points is a potentials cover, though that doesn't guarantee that its good cover. Then from each of those points we send 3-10 rays that are +- 1 meter (or so) to check whether the cover is large enough to cover a whole character. Any potential points that go through all those tests then get stored in an array, and a small algorithm picks out the best cover (based on stuff like distance, how many objects between that cover and the enemy etc..) and then uses that Vector3 as the go to point. The cover function gets called every few seconds (depends on fear, adrenaline etc..) as to simulate that, just like humans, that spacial awareness is isn't always perfect. Though this system often gives out good covers, it sometimes picks poor choices, though that also simulates human behavior."

I guess I wanted more "humanlike" behavior as the default. Let's say your brother was a soldier in Afghanistan who had just been in a firefight with some Taliban, killing three of the enemy. And then he was standing over the bodies immediately afterward. If you were his commander back at base giving him orders through a radio, wouldn't you want your brother to do a sweep of the area at that point to make sure it was clear of hostiles, even if he hadn't seen any other hostiles? (Only if you have a good relationship with your bro care about his life I guess)... I guess it breaks immersion for me if the enemy AI doesn't automatically do a cursory circular sweep of the area looking for more hostiles after killing my comrades. The fact that they immediately just stop and stand there makes the AI seem "gamey" and not realistic.

Any further enlightenment appreciated! Thank you

 

Also, just a general AI question, if I may ...please consider this scenario:

I want to have a suburb style level, with streets, shrubbery, parked cars, and multi-story houses and buildings, as obstacles. But I want the houses and buildings to be enter-able and have full navigatable interiors with multiple entrances/exits/windows, but also procedurally generated at runtime by loading pre-built house prefabs.

What do you think is the best way for RAIN to handle such a level so that an enemy AI can traverse the whole map, indoors and outdoors, seamlessly?

Have each building have its own navmesh? Can navmeshes be combined and joined together? If so, can an AI move from an indoor navmesh to an outdoor navmesh seamlessly? Or maybe build a waypoint network inside each house, and somehow connect it to an outdoor waypoint network?

Please let me know if RAIN is not suited for such a scenario, and in that case some other possible alternative. Thank you as always

 

First off, thank you for all your questions and feedback. I really enjoy these conversations

We built Squad Command with 2 things in mind:

1. We saw a standard set of AI components and behavior that is present in almost every FPS-type game (enemy AI, shooting/health systems, AI to AI communications systems, team commands, threat management, etc.).
2. Creating AI from scratch is hard but tweaking AI is easy.

Every part of Squad Command can be tweaked, enhanced, expanded, and customized with your own models/animations in your own environments. Squad Command is built with our free RAIN engine so you even have the same complete toolset we used to create this project from start to finish.

We built Squad Command not as a complete game but as a standard example. We saw that there was a standard set of AI that went into almost every FPS game. So we thought we would build that AI in a way that developers could see how each component was made, easily tweak the AI with the same free tools we used, and implement it all inside their own game.

There are a few ways you can set this up to make the movement look random. A few of the ways doesn't require waypoints at all.

Interesting indeed! I can't speak for the execution in Shooter AI itself-- having never used it. What I can say is that we feel the approach we took for tactical positions in Squad Command balances efficiency, reusability, and simplicity.

Great point, we know exactly what you mean! Details like that are what makes a game stand out and really keep the player engaged. We feel like it's up to the vision of the developer for how they want the game to play out and how they want to express their creativity through gameplay.

Like I mentioned before, we didn't set out to make Squad Command a game. We set out to give any person that ever wanted to make their own FPS game an amazing example of how to build one and tools to make it their own. That way, they can focus on the fine details (as you mentioned) that make their game amazing!

Thanks again for the questions! Let me know if you have more!

Best,
Jester

 

Excellent scenario and questions!

You read our minds Basically what you're looking for is navmesh/prefab connection and nav mesh stitching. We are currently developing this set of features for a future (soon) release. So to answer your question, currently RAIN cannot handle every part of this particular scenario and I'm not aware of a commercial solution on Unity that can.

In the future you will be able to procedurally generate nav meshes at runtime and stitch together new and static nav meshes as the environment changes/ re positions. This includes (but not limited to) voxel terrains.

Let me know if this helps! Thanks again for the questions.

Best,
Jester

 

1. Great, thanks for your replies. Basically you are saying it would be easy for me to tweak the AI behavior to get my desired behavior - random wander, area sweep after firefights, etc? You mentioned that you guys used the default RAIN tools to create Squad Command... by "easy" do you mean it will *actually* be easy to get what I want, or do you mean easy for RAIN experts?

2. It's awesome that navmesh/prefab connection is under development. I've been searching for such a solution forever. Do you think runtime navmesh generation will be performant on mobile?

 

@eridani @{RT}_Jester we have similar problem with eridani. We want to make a scene where we can put room prefabs and player can navigate correctly automatically.

CMIIW, Unity off-mesh llink can be used to connect different navmesh together in runtime right? http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/OffMeshLinks.html

But if we use Unity's navmesh we will lose RAIN goodness to patrol etc..

 

How about maybe giving RAIN the ability to use other pathfinding options, like Unity navmeshes, A*Pathfinding Project, Apex, etc. It would make RAIN a lot more flexible.

 

It will actually be easier to get what you want considering you're already starting with pre built behavior-- also you can reuse the behavior in Squad Command other projects. Yes, we created the tool so we know it front to back; however, over the years we have designed RAIN with the goal of giving anyone the ability to codelessly create realistic AI. That means while working in RAIN we refrain from diving into the source to simulate an actual user experience.

Unless what you're looking to create is a very simple prototype just picking up RAIN will be *exponentially* easier than rolling your own AI engine.

As it's being developed we will first make sure runtime nav mesh, nav mesh stitching, and other features work fluently inside the overall system-- then we optimize, optimize, optimize. The goal is to make ever feature in RAIN available for every platform.

Thanks again for the questions! Let me know if you have more!

-Jester

 

@inas This is for you too

Done and done! RAIN is both modular and completely integrated. This means you can mix and match multiple solutions if desired. You can use Unity's nav mesh, RAIN behavior trees, and Playmaker State Machines if you'd like. We feel RAIN is the best way to create AI but we're certainly not the only way-- it's up to the developer's style and preferences.

RAIN users have complete access to the underlying nav mesh so depending on your level of programming a lot of what we're adding (off mesh links and stitching) is already possible. The goal is to offer all of this codelessly and seamlessly which is what the new release will include.

 

Hi

I just downloaded and i'm trying to follow the tutorial but i'm still can't understand the difference betwen a Waypoint Network and a Waypoint Route

 

Think of it like a city:
Waypoint Network is like all the sidewalks in an area. When you see a sidewalk you know that's a potential path that goes somewhere.

Common usages: Defining streets, sidewalks, trails, etc. It gives the AI a hint from the developer saying, "This is the general path you could take to get to where you want to go."

A Waypoint Route is the specific path you define. The AI can go only 2 directions-- forwards or backwards.

Common usage: Patrols, I need my guy to go from point A to point B and back.

Let me know if this helps. Here is the RAIN wiki if you want to dive in http://rivaltheory.com/wiki/start

--Jester

 

By "done and done," are you saying integration with Unity Navmesh is already implemented in RAIN? And can I already swap in A* Pathfinding Project easily, or will it take some programming "under the hood"? Thank you Jester