feature ideas for foss ai middleware?

Hi,

Since late September of last year, I'm the AI programming lead for a mod called Outcast: Legacy of the Yods (formerly openOutcast). For those of you who don't know, it's an unofficial sequel to an old 1990's game...specifically "Outcast" by Appeal. But I'm not here to pimp said project, much as I'd like to .

As you may know, the original Outcast had some extremely interesting and versatile AI, particularly for friendly characters. They used some very early precursor to MAS I think. In our attempts to meet the expectations set there, and additionally inspired by everyone's favorite proprietary crowd simulator, I've been designing an AI and crowds editor in C# with backend support for both Unity and CryMono. It applies some adaptations of bleeding-edge things like multiagent systems, utility theory, conformant graph-based planning, and distributed belief propagation in ways that should be well-suited to designer editing. But of course I'm going to try to address the deficiencies of the Unity editor in this regard (behavior trees, anyone?). I'll also probably include an agent editor of some kind...though if I can I'll procrastinate or defer the writing of the actual UI, because I hate that stuff to no end ;P.

While it's not ready for release yet, I can confirm that it's amazingly fast compared to the unfinished Lua prototypes used in the forthcoming Oasis 1.3 demo (more specific profiling data on release), and that all the source code will be made totally public. I am strongly leaning towards an MIT license at this point, and 100% committed to maintaining the community release so it is useful and versatile. Obviously, for that reason, I don't just want to restrict myself to the narrow interests of any individual project.

So...ideas? Requests? Initial impressions? Bad experiences and/or caveats with existing, similar tools?

 

Wow, this sounds really exciting! Do go into more detail!

(I just recently got into unity and I've been researching different approaches for generative behavior in npc populations so I ran into this thread)