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i'm developing an editor for a game...

and tonight i have been thinking about implement a visual ai designer...

this is how i think it should be:

enter image description here

  1. What kind of visual components are used in theses tools? (Timers, Counters, Conditionals,...)

  2. About implementation, i'm using C# and xna, how can i save/load this graphs?

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So what exactly is the question you're asking? Examples for visual AI scripting? Critique on your image? This seems a bit too open ended right now, look at this portion of the faq – Tetrad♦ Sep 6 '11 at 4:57
Sorry, you are right... i'm going to add some clarify – Blau Sep 6 '11 at 8:24
Since it's for a tool you could go with a UI framework that only works on Windows, say C# + WPF, that way implementing these style controls will be easier. You could export the graph in a binary format (use an intermediate project for the data classes that is XNA and .NET CF compatible) or you could just go for a textual format like XML. – Roy T. Sep 6 '11 at 8:48
Your example seems to contain a lot of stuff that isn't AI. Counters, Input, Animation, so on. The AI part must be in the lines, if it exists in your example, which means it is very hard to really 'see' how these things are interacting. It isn't 'easier' than code or a scripting language. Ask yourself what a Finite State Machine would look like in this structure. Could you easily get a list of states from it? – DampeS8N Sep 7 '11 at 11:19
you are right.. maybe AI is not accurate, is more script related. I want that the game designer don't need to touch code. The game will have basic script actions that let implement puzzles and static scenes with dialogs. Of course it is a finite state machine... I don't want to reinvent the wheel, only make it more accesible :) – Blau Sep 7 '11 at 16:14

2 Answers

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The Bitsquid Blog has a couple of interesting articles regarding their implementation of 'Visual Scripting':

http://bitsquid.blogspot.com/2011/05/flow-data-oriented-implementation-of.html http://bitsquid.blogspot.com/2010/09/visual-scripting-data-oriented-way.html

The second article relates closely to the second part of your question, where the blogger describes thoughts about saving/loading and implementation of the graphs produced by the scripting interface.

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Visual Programming is a large subject. Even if you very tightly target just AI, you will probably need to handle generic logic anyway, which is where most of the work is.

And even then you'll probably always find your system just a little bit too limiting, so you either need to constantly expand it or end up with huge sprawling visual messes.

Kismet, in the Unreal engine, is one example of a visual programming language used for gameplay logic. Since Unreal SDK is free you should probably get to know it a bit before you start on your own work.

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