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Behavior Trees for Next-Gen Game AI (Video, Part 1)

Alex J. Champandard

Quite a few people asked for a PDF of my slides from my lecture at the GDC in Lyon, but I promised to do better and release a video with the animations an the whole audio. Here is the first part of the talk; it’s exactly 22:37 minutes long.






In the video, I go over the motivation for behavior trees, in particular how they relate to other techniques using hierarchical logic and what problems they address. I also give a quick introduction of the concepts behind behavior trees using a simple guard dog example that you should be familiar with if you’ve been following the tutorial series here on AiGameDev.com.

It took much longer than expected to prepare, but at least I’m a little more comfortable with video editing tools now! The second part will be posted this Sunday, and is reading for being edited… Be sure to subscribe to be notified when it’s released.


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Comments

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by Dave Mark 13.December 2007
Hell, it takes longer than 22 minutes to download the bloody thing! That's a whopper, Alex!

by alexjc 04.January 2008
Well, it seems the video has trouble loading under internet explorer. If I use Javascript, it works out ok in IE 6/7. But when I do, then it gets messed up in feed readers...

In the future, I'll use a forum to provide high-quality videos that registered members can download freely :-)

by Anonymous 04.January 2008
Will unregistered users be able to download the high-resolution videos too?

(Admin: Test for blog forum. Answer is no! :-)

by Crash 21.March 2008
Hi Alex,
I am also having difficulty viewing the videos on the blog. Have you already uploaded them somewhere else for download? I am very keen to see this material.
Sam,

by dannyBlue 21.March 2008
where can i find the video?

by Crash 22.March 2008
The video is at: http://aigamedev.com/videos/behavior-trees-part1

I don't know if alex's announcement today about videos in the other forum was in refrence to this but it worked ok for me today. Very informative and I look forward to watching the others soon.

by kofman 09.May 2008
Incredibly informative. Myself, being totally inexperienced with HTN Planners and the like, I walked away with a great understanding of Behavior Trees after watching this video.

About to move onto the next two.

by jadnohra 12.July 2008
before I jump into part2, this is the first time I see a way of 'piping' all those pieces of logic that actually do sthg (called conditions and actions here), in a really convenient way ... the concept of forcing a task to either fail or succeed and nothing else is great, it forces you to build the complexity around the behavior tree's structure, thus forcing you to make actions and conditions that are really pluggable. add the way the tree is executed using selectors and sequences, this makes it definitely a sensible 'structure' that removes the fear of things breaking down at every small unexpected event.

I was always grumpy about all the other solutions, this is the first one that makes me intuitively think, mmm this might be it. so thx for introducing / sharing!