Bolt vs Behaviour Designer

I was going to give Bolt a try, out of curiosity, but noticed that Behaviour Designer also supports bolt. According to Bolt's comparison chart, it does not support Behaviour Trees, but does support state and flow graphs. Is there any advantage to using a behaviour tree and utilize the supported integration with Both, or just stick with Bolt's state and flow graph? I'm hoping to hear from someone who might have tried both of these, and if recommended, to best way to work with both of them, thanks.

 

You can't really say bolt vs Behavior designer because they are really designed for different things. it is an apples and oranges comparison. I've used both. Bolt is purely a visual scripting tool. Like instead of C# code for scripts you can use bolt instead. Behavior designer is for creating behavior trees, which is a design pattern to do various things but was originally intended to help create AI. I believe was created during halo 2 to design their AI.

I've never tried to integrate bolt into Behavior designer. I still use behavior designer but I dropped bolt because I just found pure scripting faster easier to manage.

 

Thanks for your input. I'm aware they are not the same, but I can use the state machine support in Bolt to simulate behaviour trees if I wanted to; paired with the flow macros (even if not ideal). It may be better to do it using Behaviour Designer (which integrates with Bolt), which is what I'm exploring also (and hence the question). I am a seasoned C# developer, so I can easily use scripts. I'm just playing around with VPL out of curiosity - especially since Bolt2 (I haven't tried it yet) seems many times more powerful, and can generate C# scripts from the visual design.

 

Behavior Designer has addon packs that are a real timesaver for controlling how agents move and coordinate with each other. Sure, you could write the behaviors yourself, but the addons are inexpensive and already tested.

 

Since bolt is visual scripting you can do whatever you want,. As tonyLi said. Behavior Designer is really mostly just a time saver. To me Behavior Designer is very much worth it.