[Now Free] Create Adaptive A.I. in your games using coAdjoint Orbit

Introducing coAdjoint Orbit.

Orbit is an adaptive A.I. editor extension for Unity bringing true artificial intelligence to Unity for the first time. Orbit uses an uncomplicated editor, meaning Orbit can be working in your game in under an hour.

Orbit addresses a fundamental problem with most video games: generally speaking, games do not adapt to the way we play them.

Orbit solves this problem by allowing you to train A.I. to change their behaviour based on different play styles of a user. Orbit makes your games dynamic, re-playable and challenging in ways that other games simply cannot match.

Orbit could be used to make:

- Incredible first person shooters where enemies change their tactics based on your play style
- Amazing RTS games, where the ratio of different enemies units could change depending on the tactics you're using
- Adaptive educational games which automatically adjust difficulty or focus on the user's weak subjects
- A complex morality system, as I did on my YouTube channel here

Link to the Asset Store:
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/content/14379

See the software in action:

NEW DEMO: turn-based fighting game with adaptive A.I. (WIP)

NEW TUTORIAL SERIES! Understand the basics and see a real world example of Orbit in Action!

Our website:
http://coadjoint.co.uk

Please feel free to ask me any question you have about the software, or any other coAdjoint software on the Unity Asset Store.

Thanks,

Tom

 

your video recording is set to so low. I have to blast my speakers to hear you clearly.

I suggest making a shorter video which describes how it work, under 3 mins. It's too long.

 

I'm not sure if I understand anything yet... my question is... is this used to determine the morality or qualities of the player and sets the game up accordingly, or could a neutral npc be corrupted by the morality of the player or taught new skills by the player, like a follower who has good traits but becomes corrupted because of the players choices during quests or game play?

Also I have no idea how this is implemented into a game...

 

imtrobin, I apologise about the video, unfortunately there was nothing I could do about that at the time of recording but will be reuploading with better audio. With regards to a short video, I will certainly be doing that in the near future, although this could create confusion as it's not a simple editor extension with one purpose.

Licarell, Orbit can be used for many things, but the main purpose is to allow the A.I. in a game to change their behavior based on information about the user. If I understand you correctly, Orbit could be used for both of the tasks you've described above, although you would obviously need to build quite a bit of technology around it.

The implementation in a game is easy: you simply need to pass a double array to Orbit which represents some information about the player at the current time. Orbit then returns an analysis of what that data means about the user. What information you pass to Orbit, and the returned integer is entirely determined by the software's user case, and the training process, as demonstrated in the video.

 

Video reuploaded with better audio!

 

Hi,
I have sent a couple of emails to support but never received a reply, so posting here now.

I'm interested in possibly using Orbit for "Adaptive educational games which automatically adjust difficulty or focus on the user's weak subjects".

It's good to see some documentation and example video up on the site finally, but some more examples would be good in order to be able to determine suitability for project use in this context.

Some questions:
What is the Orbit SVM based on? LibSVM or ?
Will you be releasing the source with the package?
(Reason: I'm very wary of buying high priced packages without source code. It's much more comfortable knowing you have the source if developer stops maintaining the package, especially for key components like AI)
Could you clarify the licensing with Orbit?

I ask because only after browsing the doc's which just went up did I discover that the Action license for what you buy on the Asset store is not a distribution license. I think you need to make very clear on the Asset Store exactly what type of license you are selling.
I'd like to get confirmation that this is not the case with Orbit.

http://coadjoint.co.uk/docs/documentation/action/frequently-asked-questions/ How does the licensing system work?

coAdjoint are currently using a 3-tier licensing system for Action. The version currently available on the Unity Asset Store entitles you to the Developer Licence. This is a one computer only installation, meaning that the computer that you register Action on will be the only computer that will be able to use the software. You can, however, use the Action Editor for Unity on any computer to design your networks and libraries. If you wish to register on multiple computers, please contact enquires@coadjoint.co.uk.

The Developer Licence will not allow coAdjoint Action to work in Unity-built games running on computers other than the registered computer, unless that computer is registered with coAdjoint as well. If you want to distribute a game using coAdjoint Action then you must apply for a distribution licence. There are two versions of the distribution license:
Light Distribution: Designed for sharing demos or small projects. Once the executable game has started running, coAdjoint Action will only continue to work for 6 hours. Restarting the demo will allow for another 6 hour period of game-play using coAdjoint Action. Upgrading to the light Distribution Licence is free and can be done by emailing enquiries@coadjoint.co.uk.
Full Distribution: Designed for full releases of your game. This license gives you unrestricted use of coAdjoint Action on any computer for any period of time. Upgrading to the full license requires the acceptance of a new End User Licence Agreement and also may require a contract to be written with coAdjoint. Please email enquires@coadjoint.co.uk for more information, or to request a full distribution license.

ty!

 

Hi Sonicviz,

Firstly I would like to apologize profusely for the problem with the support/enquiries email address, I now know what the problem is and am extremely annoyed at the person responsible!

Secondly I think your application for the software is one of the most interesting ways to use it, would definitely like to feature your game on my website/ social media.

With regards to more demos, I'm working on as a couple of demos in my spare time but unfortunately can only get so much done whilst maintaining other responsibilities at the same time. The website will be updated when they're up.

Orbit uses a C# port of LibSVM written by myself which I've called UnitySVM. It's been rigorously unit tested and optimised for Unity. I'm a mathematics graduate so I hope you can trust my maths skills!

At the moment the software is built to a .dll. I have absolutely no plans to stop supporting my software, but I give my word in this forum that if I did stop support for some reason that I would do a final version of the software with source code available.

There's no licensing system for Orbit, you can buy it and use it in your games straight away.

The licensing system for Action is an unfortunate way to protect my intellectual property. Getting the light distribution license for Action is as simple as emailing me, but I will change the description on the asset store to let people know the deal.

Thank you for the questions, if you'd like any more information feel free to email on tom@coadjoint.co.uk.

I really am so angry about the enquiries emails!! :twisted:

 

Hi,
Thanks for the reply.

I'd be interested in buying it, but non-source is a dealbreaker - especially for a package ported from an open source project.

Please consider adding the source code to the Orbit package.

ty!

 

Are you referring to source for UnitySVM or the whole software?

EDIT: for clarification, the main reason for using a DLL is for convinience: when an Orbit project is built for use in a game it depends on UnitySVM code. It would be quite bad practice to have to copy over 10 scripts to a new project so it's all packaged together!

Would putting the UnitySVM source code in a GitHub repository be enough to persuade you?

 

As near as I can tell Orbit is a custom port of LibSVM (open source), the training interface and the compile to dll function for accessing the trained model from the SVM?

I'd say all of it this case, for the price you are asking.

In Unity Asset Store terms it's in the higher end price range and you won't find too many there that don't provide the source.
I've just run into too many issues with non source packages in a multiplatform deployment tool like Unity.

Your value add in this case is not the SVM per se but the packaging and continued development of it.

 

Well this is definitely something to consider but seeing how you're the first person to ask about this option I won't be making the software open source for the moment.

This may change at some stage in the future.

Thank you for the useful feedback and let me know how your game goes!

 

I'm doing more hybrid productivity tools + games.
HarpNinja ( Learn Harmonica Faster! HarpNinja ) is one I am currently looking into enhancing with some adaptive AI for player skill development.
I have a lot of ideas to implement, but will start with something simple if I can find the right solution.
I've got a working libsvm in C# Unity, but was interested in your implementation.

Chordskilz, also in my sig below, is an older product I'd like to do a complete refresh in and also add in the skills development AI.

I'm also working on a product line of learning games for early childhood music skills development.
I have a complete initial series done already, just looking at how to enhance with some simple skills AI progression.

But, as I say, I'm not big on buying black boxes - especially for key components such as this.

 

I took a look at your products and they both have a great deal of potential!

I have an offer for you: if you buy the software and send me your invoice number I'll send you the full source code straight away.

 

Done. ty!

 

You should really get more videos out; I'm intrigued, but I still don't fully understand the applications. A more complex example, expressed in something more meaningful than console output, would go a long way to justifying your price point.

 

AlphaAlpha,

Thank you for your intrigue! Have you seen the Morality Modelling video? I'm desperately trying to get out more videos as I completely understand your point. I'm currently working on a turn based fighting demo with adaptive A.I., so feel free to subscribe to my Youtube channel and it'll be out as soon as I can.

 

Hi Tom,

When you get a chance, you should take a look at the board game "The Game of Life: A Jedi's path" The game revolves around choosing the path of a Jedi or Sith. I think you will find it interesting in the context of morality modelling.

Cheers

 

After checking out some more of your videos I think I have a better understanding of the software. Your Morality Modelling videos are by far the most explanatory and I would recommend linking those directly from the Asset Store. I have a few questions about the workings:

Am I correct in that the sole purpose of the Orbit itself is to give similar levels to Skills within the Orbit when producing training samples?

Can you create multiple Libraries for the same Skill sets? For morality modelling, for example, could you have one Library designed to judge morality
from a Socialist perspective and another to do so from a Militaristic one?

I tried to think of a short-term practical application and the Unity Multipurpose Avatar system came to mind. If you are unfamiliar, UMA is a system for rigging humanoid avatars such that physical proportions can be easily modified based on scalar values to a high degree of granularity (e.g. upper arm size, upper arm length, upper body weight, etc.). Think Fight Night character creation. Now, seeing as all of these modifiers are represented as scalar values, they should be able to be turned into Skills and recognized by your system, yes? If so, would it be possible to, rather than representing the training sample as a series of values, input the values into the UMA generation system and provide a rendered body as the training sample?

If these systems could be tied together it could be possible to provide visual classification of sets of modifiers. For example, for the head you could classify it based off of attractiveness or ethnicity. For the body you could provide classifications for attractiveness, fitness, intimidation, symmetry, etc. Also, given the large and frequently bizarre variation the UMA system allows, it would be helpful if Orbit could be used to classify unreasonable extremes as invalid, allowing unsupervised but reasonable random character generation.

Am I correct that such integration is feasible?

 

Alphalpha really sorry that I didn't reply to this sooner, thought I'd replied for some reason!

I am tempted to show the morality modelling more but I'm afraid that people will assume that it's the only thing it can do. In my spare time I'm working on a mini-game that will demonstrate a more standard application of Orbit which I think will be more beneficial.

When you say the Orbits I assume you mean the groups. In that case yes. There's no definitive relationships between skills (if you're interested in this option take a look at my other software coAdjoint Action).

You can definitely have two libraries for the same skill set. In the lingo of the software they're called networks, but the idea is the same. You would simply duplicate your network then train it twice.

I think your UMA example would be absolutely brilliant! I'm actually in contact with the maker of UMA so both of us would be very interested in this idea. As it stands Orbit would take a bit of modification but I'd be more than happy to perform that if you're seriously interested in this?

All I'd need to do is allow you to use an imported data set as your training example, or alternatively If you buy the software I'll be more than happy to provide you with source code and you could mod it yourself?

PLEASE let me know if you go ahead with this idea, I'd be very happy to feature this on my website/social media/youtube. Feel free to email me at tom@coadjoint.co.uk if you'd like to discuss this in depth

 

I am sorry for the late reply. I have been preoccupied with other concerns lately and this slipped my mind. I'm still in the process of learning Unity and have yet to fully familiarize myself with UMA. Also, I cannot afford to invest in software at the moment so any integration I might attempt would have to take place in the indeterminate future. However, should I surmount all of these obstacles I will inform you of such as such an integration does interest me.

 

Hi Guys,

I've just uploaded a new video showing coAdjoint Orbit being used in a game!

The demo is a turn based fighting game with adaptive A.I.. Your opponent changes his attacking and defensive strategies based on the way you're playing.

Video:

This is a work in progress, more videos will be coming soon.

Don't forget that you can create your own adaptive A.I. by buying coAdjoint Orbit on the Unity Asset Store NOW!

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/content/14379

 

Hello,

Can this be used in abstract board games like chess, checkers, othello?

 

Absolutely. I'm an avid chess player and think it would be great to use Orbit to change the aggressiveness/passiveness of an engine. Obviously chess engines 'know' the best move in a situation but Orbit could be used to make a more interesting opponent by dynamically changing it's behaviour throughout a game.

The problem with playing current chess engines is that they don't play like humans. Chess engines adjust difficulty by simply making bad move choices every now and again. What would be great is if a chess engine simply played following a particular strategy to counteract your current strategy. It would take some thought but for me that would be fantastic!

 

The reason I asked is because I was wondering if it could be used in the AI of my game.

Here is a buggy beta version with two AIs. It doesn't do any analysis of the human player but it does adjust aggressiveness based on how many moves are left in the game.

http://www.theoctagontheory.com

And here is a short write up about the AI in my game:
http://aigamedev.com/open/interview/the-octagon-theory/

I'd like to try anything to improve the strength of the AI in my game.
Thanks.

 

This is an interesting problem for sure. Have you done research into the way Chess engines produces 'best move' suggestions? In all honesty I think your best bet would be to implement something like that first (i.e. looking for best move continuations rather than best current move), then create depth and 'fun' using a strategic controller like Orbit to adapt to offensive/defensive play styles.

 

Hey everyone I've had a Unity Account for a while now but I have been quite busy with starting on a fighting game. The tool I'm using from the Asset Store is called Universal Fighting Engine (UFE). Since the main thing UFE is missing is AI I was wondering coAdjoint do you know of a way to get your package working with a game toolkit such as UFE? Since I see Orbit does not seem to be a Pathfinding package but more of a Neural Network. I would like to know if there's a way for you or someone else to see if Orbit can be used in conjunction with a game toolkit from the Asset Store.

 

Hi Alexarah,

I that it's been a long time since you posted but it's very hard to follow this thread since it's always getting lost! Orbit is very modular and won't interfere with any other packages. To use Orbit with any piece of software you simply need to get a classification from Orbit, then change your variables based on the integer value Orbit returns.

Hope this is useful,

Tom

 

Do you think this would be too "heavy" to use for Animal AI in a survival game?

 

It absolutely depends on what you need. If you want AI to be a main feature of your game I think it would be great. If you need something really simple then perhaps it's not appropriate.

Just as a note, I'll be releasing a video shortly about how Orbit can be used for automatic difficulty balancing.

 

I am working on a survival game where there are no enemies. just wildlife. I want the wildlife to be able to react to the player and what the player does. this sounds perfect for it, but I will be having ALOT of animals being simulated.

 

That sounds like a cool game. Having lots of animals won't be a problem as Orbit doesn't run every frame. What you could do was reclassify the player every minute or so and have the animals react in different ways based on the player classification. Having 5, 50 or 500 animals won't make any difference

 

Excellent. Ive just hit your site and Im reading through the documentation to get a good grasp of Orbit.

The core aspect or focus of my game is a "living world" in which I am modelling an entire ecosystem like simulation over a 12 month yearly cycle. The players action effect the ecosystem and so I need animal AI which can adapt to the changing environment and also adapt to the player so that they are not predictable.

Most animals will be passive, so I am hoping your system can be used to condition the AI against the Environment's "actions" along with the player's.

 

This sounds like a really interesting application. If you decide to use the software keep in touch (email on website) as I'd be very interested to hear about your progress.

Feel free to ask me any questions you have.

 

Nice! I really enjoyed the tutorials. How easy would this be to incorporate into a small MOG environment (500 or so users)? AI is a very important part of our game. We want a game with a strong social/community feature as well as dynamic NPCs in order to create an environment for role players. The flexibility and complexity of Orbit seems perfect for us.

 

Hi Teila, glad that you enjoyed the videos. Thank you for your kind words and interest in the software! Orbit should be easy to integrate with your game as it's very modular: you can make calls to the API without having it deeply entrenched in your existing codebase. I think Orbit would be great in a MOG with dynamic NPCs as, for example, they could react uniquely to every player in the game, or use complex behavioural modelling to create a rich and evolving NPC ecosystem.

If you decided to go with Orbit I'd be more than happy to help with the integration of the plugin into your game, let me know how you get on!

 

Wow, that was fast! Thanks for responding so quickly.

I sat down yesterday with one of my programmers and we thought of all the things we could use this for in our game. Amazing potential! I love the idea of a dynamic NPC ecosystem, especially since our game won't have hundreds of thousands of players. The world will seem so much more alive.

I have passed the documentation on your website along to my lead programmer. Thanks again.

 

Sorry for not replying for a while I've been quite busy working with the various Unity plugins I bought from the Asset Store. By the way Tom your reply was nice but not quite informative enough. A tutorial on using Orbit with other tools from the Asset Store would help a lot. If not a tutorial a deeper description would help too because I'm still not quite sure what you mean about changing the variables based on the integer values that Orbit returns. Oh yeah I'm still trying to figure out how to use Orbit with Universal Fighting Engine (UFE) from the Asset Store. Although the creator UFE has just about finished AI implementation I would still like to use Orbit in order to make AI that adapt to players' actions in-game. This is something I would love to have because UFE's AI still doesn't look quite intelligent enough to adapt to the players' style of playing. Not unless UFE's AI imitates that it's adapting to a player's action when it's actually reading a player's input thus knows how to counter. Which we all know that is cheating which is what a lot of AI do in today's fighting games. Either all of that or the AI can be designed to just be flat out dumb lol.

 

I have to agree with Alexarah. While the programmers might figure it out, I would love to see more documentation on how to actually tie the information from Orbit to the game. I saw the videos on the results of the Orbit data but not how to use it in the scripts. Maybe it is easy but I am a visual person and would like to see it happen.

We are very interested. Action looks amazing too but I must admit, the license really scares us. In our case, the asset would stay on our server and never be distributed to other computers/clients but not sure how that would work with this license. Very confusing.

Regardless, this is an amazing product and we really want to find a way to make it work, even if we stick with our own skill system and go with only Orbit.

 

Thank you for this useful information everyone. It's great to hear that people are excited by the technology and I agree that there's still plenty of work to be done on providing information about using the software. The greatest issue I have is that it takes me a great deal of time to produce decent demos that realistically reflect the requirements of a game. My best example is in my video on adaptive A.I. in a fantasy game, if you guys haven't seen this then please take a look at the video link below

I think it would help if I explain more about the process of using Orbit.

1) Firstly, a designer must decide what elements of a game they want to be adaptive. For example, in a fighting game, the designer may want to make an opponent change fighting style based on the fighting style of a user.

2) The designer/developer must then decide what variables will be used to measure the performance of the user (slight technical aside: these values must be normalised between 0 and 100). Returning to our fighting game example, a measure of the user's performance could be a rating of their ability in individual combos. If the user was able to perform a combination correctly 100% of the time, the user's rating in that combination would be 100. This measuring process would then be repeated for every combination that a user could perform (this is by no means the only way or the best way to measure performance in a fighting game, just an example that has come straight to mind).

3) The designer/developer must decide what classifications of users are important for their game: this is the process of creating groupings of users play-styles that Orbit will use at run-time. Every user must fit in to a particular play-style (even if that play-style is 'no theme' play-style). For example, in our fighting game example, we might want to use 3 classifications or play-styles: drunken style, counter-attacker and no particular play-style (again, please take these with a pinch of salt!)

4) You then must train Orbit to understand how different measurements of the player correlate to play-styles. Orbit will give you example variable values for a fictional user, which you must then assign to a play-style. In our fighting game example, this would involve associating high skill levels in particular combos to play-styles (good at drunken style combos means drunken style classification - good at counter-attacking combos means counter-attacker classification etc)

5) Orbit is now ready to be used in a game. At game run-time, Orbit does the exact opposite of what you did in the training process: you provide values of the measuring variables that you defined before and Orbit produces a classification (this is what I meant by the integer return value; the classification is returned not as a string like 'drunken-style' but as a integer corresponding to a classification).

6) Now that you have information about the classification of the user, you can alter the behaviour of your A.I./game/story generator/difficulty manager/etc to better suit the user. It's really up to the designers and developers as to what you do with that information - you could tie it with another plugin on the Unity Asset Store like Playmaker or UFE by using a simple switch statement.

I hope this goes into a little more detail than I did before, it's easy to forget that these things aren't so obvious to people who haven't been working with the software for a year!

Teila, I understand what you mean about Action, the licence system is simply a way to stop larger companies making huge wads of money from a game using the system, whilst I might only end up with $100! I'm actually in the process of updating the agreement for Action but it will take some time. If you're serious about trying it out, I would be happy to discuss setting up a trial and, if you were interested in the technology after that, discuss a deal without the licence agreement. Please feel free to email me on tom@coadjoint.co.uk

Great talking to you guys, let me know if there's anything else I can do to help. This is all a work in progress and I'm extremely thankful for such constructive feedback.

 

Thank you! This does help.

We are not a larger company and probably won't make tons of money although if we do, we would be happy to share. I will send you an email tomorrow after I finish struggling with Maya.

 

Just as Teila stated I also thank you for your more detailed info on Orbit! I'll be sure to take notes on the examples and hints you just gave us. Oh by the way Tom did you not mention releasing the turn based game in your video to people who use Orbit? In other words releasing it to the public for developers to better understand Orbit. If not that's fine with me though. But anyway thanks again for the detailed tips and hints Tom. Cheers bro!

 

The game would be great. I did see in a video where it was said the game would be released. Even if you just release the small part you did, it would help us to be able to see how you tied together the scripts. Any chance you could do this? I think that would seal the deal for us with Orbit at least.

I am going to send an email off to you about Action today. I need a break from Maya. First I need to check the kids' schoolwork, as they keep reminding me.

 

I'd be happy to release the demo so far, I'll post back here when it's up. The reason why progress stopped on the demo was mainly due to my time being taken up by contracts, although I do plan on finishing it.

 

Thank you! That would be great. I sent off an email.

 

Hey Tom I was wondering is there some more API documents on Orbit than what's on the official site? Because I'm now trying to provide info on Orbit's API to Yumcha whose one of the developers working on UFE. I noted every important document that I saw and typed it out then posted it on the UFE forums for him to see. I just did it so I'm waiting for his response now. So Tom will you able to reference me to more documents on Orbit's API? Yumcha needs to know as much about the API of Orbit as possible in order for him to help me implement it into UFE. Oh yeah I was able to at least ask him about how switch statements work in UFE and he gave me a straight forward example of it.

 

Hi everyone,

I've uploaded the apotheosis demo so far in a fairly incomplete form. I am aware of two bugs, so if you want to play it (which I recommend) then be aware that these bugs may ruin your game!

LINK: www.coadjoint.co.uk/apotheosis-incomplete.unitypackage

Controls (when defending):

S/Down: block
A and D/Left and Right: Dodge left or right
Left Click: Parry (if timed to coincide with the skeleton swinging his sword)

Controls (when skeleton has finished his turn):
W/Up: Move to Attack
S/Down: Charge up (if you charge up and don't get hit in the next room you'll do double damage)

Controls (when attacking):
A and D/Left and Right: Move left or right
Left Click: Quick Attack
Right Click: Charge attack: hold the the RMB down to charge up an attack and do extra damage.

Make sure you take a look at the little GUI in the bottom left: that tells you what the classifications from Orbit are. I apologise for all the code being uncommented!

Hope this helps everyone.

 

Hi Alexarah, there's no more documentation on Orbit than what's on the website. It might be easier if I have a word with the UFE guys myself, could you give me some details on how to contact them?

 

The link above to the demo doesn't work. Just spins and spins.

Edit: It works.

 

Here's the official website of UFE
http://www.ufe3d.com/doku.php
In order to speak to MisterMind or Yumcha have must create a forum account though but I've already done so and it's very straight forward actually. The section of the forum that I would recommend is the 3rd Party Development section. I'm pretty sure MisterMind and Yumcha would glad to have Orbit integrated into UFE. Also I've actually already made a thread about Orbit to Yumcha in the source code section of the UFE forums. Although he stated that the upcoming UFE version 1.1 has an AI System of it's own but I say Orbit still beats it in a ton of ways. I think the AI System of UFE and Orbit put together in UFE will make a huge difference! So Tom if you have or find time to look into the UFE forums all should go well since their 3rd Party Development section of the forums states to promote 3rd Party Addons want to be compatible with UFE! Hopefully you'll be able to make this integration happen. One more thing, the developers of Playmaker has UFE support on their to do list since it received more than enough votes to do so and that's saying a lot if you ask me.

 

We checked out the demo (link above) and it all made perfect sense. My programmer sat down and explained it all to me in words I sort of understood. He may need some help but I think he has a good handle on it. He happens to be a math guy too.

We are just waiting to hear back from you guys to see if we should buy just Orbit or the bundle. Can't wait to get started!

Thanks for sharing the link. The demo helped a great deal.