Due to circumstances beyond my present control, my career trajectory has taken a sharp turn (quantified by delta function ). I hope Dirac would be proud of that! In order to work with same passion and rigor, I have channelized my energy into Artificial Intelligence (AI) and parted ways from Physics. Of course it was painful and depressing, but I found that even such feelings have utility in the catharsis. This blog-post is an attempt to show just that!

The gaming industry has played pivotal role in reshaping the modern networking architecture and graphics rendering (replication, realistic rendering and ray tracing). Therefore it is not unreal to expect the industry to push forward the AI realm. This can be estimated from sheer number of players in games like Fortnite (250 million), Halo and  GTA V among others. Any breakthrough in the field of AI can be conveniently and collectively scrutinized by millions of players, facilitated by streamline workflow including developers, players and academics.

Behavior tree (BT) is an important mathematical structure which generates appropriate series of tasks in modular fashion. For instance, a patrolling pawn in some evil fortress. Unreal Engine (UE) is one of the very first game engines to implement BT in very natural way (given the visual scripting structure of UE called Blueprints). I will demonstrate the BT in action using UE project in this blog-post.

The BT can be pictured as

Here black nodes represent the “composites” (from of flow control) and pink nodes represent “tasks”. I have used two categories of composites

1. Selector: Executed in left-right pattern. It stops traversing the subtrees once successful execution branch is found.
2. Sequence: Executed in left-right pattern. It doesn’t stop executing subtrees until unsuccessful execution branch is  found.

The entire BT is executed top-down pattern in deterministic way. A next level implementation could involve assigning probabilities with each edge resulting in particular node, but we won’t talk about that here.

If you were to petrol, what would be the list of tasks you’d make to execute. Probably it might include

1. Spotting enemy
2. Chasing enemy if spotted
3. Else perform random patrol in arbitrary directions

Now next step is to further divide the tasks into single elemental entities. For instance spotting enemy task includes checking lineofsight actors and spin towards appropriate actor if found. Thus the hierarchy and placement of composites and task should be as shown in the figure above.

Now BT in action corresponding to the chase is shown below.

One can clearly visualize the train of executing branches of the tree. Since Chase Player is a sequence node, we can deduce that the tasks “Rotate to face BB entry”  and “BTT_ChasePlayer” have been executed and now “Move To” task is undergoing and indeed that is what is being done in the Editor.

Next, the BT simulation of patrolling with that task “Move To” is

and “Wait” is

The complete information to setup the project is detailed at https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/Engine/ArtificialIntelligence/BehaviorTrees/BehaviorTreeQuickStart/index.html. I encourage to try!

Finally I will give a teaser to upcoming UE project https://github.com/ravimohan1991/MAI