Best AI Asset for a game that allows extensive in-game AI customization?

Hi, I'm looking to make a game where one of the core mechanics is for the player to build and author A.I for playable units through some sort of visual scripting in game. A good example of a similar existing game would be Carnage Heart...

TL;DR: It's a game that let's you build/customize a squad of mechs from it's parts down to the A.I and let's you pit your squad against another squad of mechs in a particular level... The unique feature of the game is the extensive A.I authoring and the fact that once you deploy your mechs you have no control over them. Meaning you need to completely rely on the A.I that was designed for the mechs...

I am looking for a good AI asset that covers all the basics i.e Path finding, Dynamic Obstacle Avoidance, Steering Behaviors (mostly for group/squad movement) and maybe Utility A.I?
But more importantly I want it to be easily extendable to allow the player to author their own custom A.I in-game easily...

In terms of my skill level, I have been a gameplay programmer for almost 4 years now and I've been using Unity since Unity 3.5... The main reason for wanting to use an existing asset instead of rolling my own solution is mostly to save time. This is my own pet/hobby project which I am doing alone and I'd rather not waste time reinventing the wheel when I can be using it for play testing...

I've already done my own research and so far the APEX set of A.I assets seems to fit the bill quiet well but they are not free and getting all of the different parts adds up to quite a hefty sum.. I would very much like to have a second opinion before making the plunge... Any counter recommendations are warmly welcomed.

 

Well, since nobody else has replied, I'll jump in with a brief plug for my MiniScript asset.

You'd still want to supply some functions for the tricky stuff like pathfinding, but the rest you could probably let users just code. Still, I know you said you wanted something visual, so this may not be what you're looking for. (You could of course make a drag-and-drop UI that generates MiniScript code under the hood, but that's probably more work than you want to put into it too.)

 

Thanks for the recommendation. It's not exactly what I was looking out for.. But it's definitely given me food for thought. I haven't ruled out a simplified scripting language within my game for authoring the A.I. But like I mentioned before this is more of a hobby project. I plan to just clone the core mechanic and get it working first before I start to explore other forms A.I authoring... Another A.I system that I was considering was from Armored Core Formula Front..

This is obviously using some sort of utility A.I under the hood...

 

FWIW, I'm a huge fan of the utility approach to AI. It's very flexible, and generally very easy to get reasonable behavior — much less likely to get stuck in some corner than, say, FSMs. It's also very easy for users to understand and tweak, and less likely to break completely when you add some new behavior.

The big downside is that it actually produces spontaneous behavior, rather than scripted behavior. So it's pretty useless for something like cut scenes or scripted encounters, where the game designer wants tight control over how the agents react. I believe this sort of need is why FSMs and behavior trees still exist; those are basically just scripts for the agent to slavishly follow (which is what the designers want).

So I guess in your case, you'd have to consider whether players want to define drives and let the agents sort out for themselves how best to meet them, or whether instead players want fine control over agent behavior.

 

Actually that decision alone could take the game in wildly different directions contextually... With node/tree based A.I authoring it feels more like you are actually programming a machine. While with a utility system you could put on another layer where you are tweaking the behavior of a human "pilot" where you could tweak more "human" traits like "aggression"...