[UPDATED] ICECreatureControl v1.4.0 - creature AI for enemies, animals, monsters, zombies ...

Hi TonanBora, please check the Targets and their associated Behaviour Modes of your insubordinated creatures. It could be that some of your creatures using the wrong target and therefore also a wrong behaviour. If there are two (or more) available targets with the same priority at the same time, your creature will randomize its selection, so make sure that the desired target will have a suitable priority, also check the UPDATE mode of the ‘Random Positioning Range’ of the targets, if such a range isn’t adjusted to zero you should make sure that the random position will be refreshed if the target will be activated and/or if the creature have reached the current position, otherwise your creature don’t know what’s to do and run its idle behaviour. Finally you should check also the given behaviours, as you know you can define several rules for each behaviour mode and it could be that you have inadvertently added an additional rule without the required motion settings, in such a case simply define the required parameter or delete the additional rule.

I hope my answer will be helpful to fix this issue, in any case please feel free to contact me whenever you have a question or if you run into a problem with ICE. And as you might know, in urgent cases you can contact me also via skype.

Have a great day!

Pit

 

Hi Wood, I hope Jacky's brilliant answer was already helpful to you but apart from that here you can find also some additional background information about the damage handling ...
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/up...-monsters-zombies.347147/page-12#post-2585798

Have a great day!

Pit

 

Hi Pit,

Bought your asset, very impressed. I've almost got what I want working, need some help/advice please. Basically I want four things to happen. on game start:

1) NPC is frozen, does not move unless it detects a player is within 100.
2) (Detect player - under 100), the NPC starts it patrol.
3) Under 30, the NPC finds the player and starts to move towards the player.
4) At under 3 the NPC stops and starts to attack.

I have got the NPCs to patrol, detect the player and attack, but I want the addition start of the npc is frozen until it detects a player within 100 then starts to patrol.

The problem I am having is I can get the npc to stay frozen, but when a player comes within 100 it then targets the player, I tried targeting the waypoint, but then the npc only goes to the first waypoint, adding a waypoint group is null. I almost need a second target to add. on an add rule, and theres is not an option for that, additional rules seem to only apply to the first rules target.

In case your wondering, I dont want hundreds of npc's moving continuously, thats a waste of network, I only want the npc's to start when a player is in range, and obviously to stop the patrol when the player goes back out of range.

Any thoughts ?

Regards

 

How do you want the Patrol behavior to work exactly?
Do you have set way points that you want them to follow, or do you just want them to wounder around?

If you just want them to wounder around, try the following:
> Add a rule to the creature
> Set its priority higher than its home priority (if it has one), but lower than the other interactor rules.
> Set the selection range too 100.
> set its behavior to "WALK", or some other behavior with movement.
> Enable the target move specification.
> Set the first number of "Random Positioning Range" too around 50 - 100.
> For the "Update Position on... " options, select "Active" and "Reached"

Then go to the Essentials settings, and modify the following options for the creatures Home:
> Enable the "Target Move Specifications"
> Set the Random Positioning Range to some value higher than 0.
> Finally, make sure none of the "Update Position" options are selected.

Now, the creature will at first move to it's random position, but will stay there until the player moves within a distance of 100, then begin wandering about.

 

@icetec Thanks Pit!

 

Hi Pit, is there an easy way to have running distance between each creature. I'm using the creatures with Puppet Master and the creatures merge together when running for a target, seems they are avoiding collision, I just want them to have their own space ?

 

Hi TonanBora / Pit, thanks for the reply. I cannot seem to get it working, I attach screenshots. When you mean 'Add a rule to the creature', should that be a 3rd act for the player ? or a new interactor?, if new, then what do I chose as target? - if the target is left as the player, then when the player comes within 100 the npc moves to the player instead of randomly moving, or patrolling. A screenshot or two back would help my brain..

 

@awfdadfadadadaddaad
The home settings are perfect.

With the whole "new rule" thing, you can use an existing rule for player detection if you already have one set up, but if you don't, then you will want to add a new one specifically for the 100 distance detection.
Here is a screen shot of the settings for the 100 distance player detection:


You have to make sure that the "Random Positioning Range" is a fairly high number, I suggest around 50-100.
This means the creature will pick a random point within this distance from the player, and move there, and thus produce a kind of wandering/patrolling behavior. I would not put it any higher than 100, as then the creature may wander out of the 100 distance player detection range, and resume its freezing behavior, unless of course, you don't care about this happening.

Now, keep in mind that this rule is only for detecting if the play is within 100. You will want other rules for spoting the player and chasing the player down, or what ever other behavior you want the creature to do if it sees the player.
Also, keep the priority of this rule lower than all other interactors rules setup for the player.

 

Hi Julian, the best way to avoid this behaviour is to use ICE with a Rigidbody or CharacterController. Simply switch the Motion Type in the essential settings to one of them. If you are using a Rigidbody (and Collider) please deactivate 'Use Gravity' and 'Is Kinematic' and freeze all rotations and the y position (just to avoid that your creature will build a pyramid).
Please note: activating the Gravity of the Rigidbody will deactivate the internal Gravity, so please check the 'Handle Gravity' flag in the essential settings after changing the Gravity of the Rigidbody.

Have a great day!

Pit

 

@TonanBora - that's great - thanks a lot for your detailed answer

@awfdadfadadadaddaad if you want you could also contact me in skype, so I can help you with the frist steps in realtime.

 

Thanks. I did use this method, just wondered if there was a setting for distance between creatures so they do not fight over space. But what you had suggested works just as good when Puppet Master is not a part of the creature. I will have to play around with the Puppet Master settings to see if I can stop this.

 

Ah okay, to realize this you could play with the target offset. By default the TargetMovePosition will be the transform position of a target, but as you know you can use the 'Random Positioning Range' to randomize this position, but you can also define an offset to affect the TargetMovePosition and such an offset could be also randomized, so all your creatures will use another postion during an attack.

Press the Target Move Specification 'OVERRIDE' button of the of your ATTACK interactor rule to override the initial move settings. Set the 'Preferred Move Position' to OFFSET, define a small 'Random Positioning Range' (e.g. 0.5 or 1) and set the offset distance to 1 or another suitable value. Now activate the angle 'DYN' and 'RND' button and define the desired min and max angle. Now your creatures will using different attack postions while your ATTACK interactor rule is active.

Please don't forget to set the 'Viewing Direction' of your ATTACK behaviour to CENTER, so that your creature will facing the prey.

This solution should be suitable to avoid fightings over space - at least for a clearly number of attackers - and I hope this will help you to fix your issue.

Have a nice day!

Pit

 

Awesome yes I have it, many thanks. I get it now, the random distance _is_ from the player itself, I was playing with a much lower option and another rule was triggering, thus it seemed the wander around was not working.

Cheers TonanBora

 

I noticed the random movement option, can actually pick a spot outside of the terrain-through the terrain to a non navmesh area (off the terrain-plane completely), the npc just gets stuck trying to get to the non walkable area, what's the best way to deal with that, any options in ice?, or is it as simple as setting an invisible barrier as an obstacle, although I suspect the npc would still get stuck, is this maybe a bug? the random picked point should be on the terrain right ? and if using a navmesh walkable ?

(Maybe I'm doing something most people do not do, maybe its easier to auto spawn npc's when a player is detected within a distance, and have them auto patrol or random move from a fixed point that cannot go off the terrain and if the player moves in another direction, after 5 minutes destroy the npc's, or disable the ice controller, whatever is more efficient; actually that might be better, instantiate the npc's but disable the ice controller to freeze them in place, then re-enable when detecting a player in range (have to be my own scripts))

 

Works great Pit - thanks!

 

Hey Pit, just a quick question. Will the new version of ICE Creature Control be compatible with the present version? I'd like to keep working on my game, but not sure if I should wait until the next version as I don't want to have to redo everything. Also, have you been able to make any improvements to the ICE AI creatures using physics/rigidbodies? I've experienced some unexpected results. Cheers.

 

If you define random positioning ranges you should make sure that all potential positions will be within the walkable areas and reachable for your creature (also while using a navigation mesh). Smaller obstacles could be handled by activating the internal obstacle avoidance and you can activate the deadlock handling, so your creature will update its target move position if it detects a deadlock.

Your mentioned feature will be included in future versions, especially to optimize the performance while using large herds. Currently you could handle it by your own code, simply by deactivating the creature or its parent object, also you could spawn or destroy a creature as desired – the use of the internal pool management of the Creature Register is optional and not obligatory required. But please note, that your creatures could do also useful tasks and affect your gameplay if they are not close to your player, so please think about which method would be the best to reach the desired goal. Destroy will remove the creature completely. Deactivating its GameObject will hide the creature and stops all its activities, but the creature will stay accessible, hold its status and all its inventory items and could be activated again according your desired rules. Deactivating the ICECreatureControl component will be similar to deactivating the GameObject, but your creature will stay visible by running its last active animation (should be an idle loop). An additional option would be to use a LODGroup or to deactivate/activate the renderer by your own code, in both cases your creature stays fully active, could interact with its surrounding environment and/or its targets but will be invisible according to the specified LOD or distance settings.

I hope this will be helpful to you.

Have a nice day!

Pit

 

Hi Jon, as already mentioned the new version of ICECreatureControl will be based on the ICE World Framework to simplify the integration of ICE classes in own projects, but while rewriting the code I paid attention to keep the serialized data structure intact, so the bigger part of the settings will be 100% compatible with v1.1 (e.g. Targets and Behaviours settings) but because of new and/or improved features it would be in any case highly advisable to check the existing settings and adapt them if required. However, before publishing the new version I’ll run tests with older scenes to prepare a list with all required adjustments – but don’t worry - this will be a short list. Also I’ll will provide you a beta asap …

Related to your second issue. While steering a creature by using a non-kinematic Rigidbody the motions will be affected by physical forces, which looks more realistic, but on the other hand you will have a lack of accuracy and in some cases also some unwished side-effects.

Basically such a behaviour is absolutely natural, because if a creature is moving on a hillside it will sliding downhill according to the give friction and if it has a collision it will be affected by the working load. All these is natural and will be given while using a non-kinematic Rigidbody, so the unwished side-effects could be absolutely desired, but in contrast to a real creature, which always try to compensate such physical impacts, the current version of ICE can’t react to such external forces in a conformable way and will stubborn follow its given behaviour and movement instructions. I plan to handle this issue while improving the internal mecanim features, because in addition to compensate the movements I have to manipulate also the animations. But apart from that you could improve the behaviour by yourself by using root motions and external components such as Bone Controller or Rune’s free Locomotion System (if you want test it with the last one I can help you to fix rune's component for unity 5). Also you can avoid such unexpected results by activate ‘Is Kinematic’, so ICE will simulate physical forces internal – it’s not perfect but makes sure that your creature’s moves will be respectable and not uncontrolled like a drunken sailor who’s sliding along the pier Also I would recommend to deactivate the gravity of a creature’s Rigidbody, because activating the gravity of the body will automatically deactivate the internal physics of ICE.

I hope this will be helpful so far but please feel free to contact me whenever you need support or runs into a problem with ICE.

Have a great day!

Pit

 

when i use it the zombie attack me and chase me but the problem is :
the zombie walk in the sky it have no gravity ! the zombie don't detect the terrain !

 

Hi Hamdouch, please make sure that the 'Ground Check' settings (Essentials) are correctly defined (e.g. if you are using 'RAYCAST' you have to specify and assign the desired ground layers). While using a Rigigbody you should freeze all rotations and at least the y position, so physics/collisions can't lift your zombie. Please note that activating the gravity of the body will deactivate the internal gravity, so check also the 'Use Interal Gravity' flag.

Hope this will be helpful to fix your issue ...

Have a great day!

Pit

 

Hi,

Could anyone help how should I setup ICE with GAIA to create random ICE spawner ,where the animals spawn ?
I would create that if on a given area only one or two animals will be able to spawn.
Thank you

 

Hi, I didn't find anything about Avian / Flying Creatures.
I tried the "AVIAN" setting in BodyOrientation, but that seems to have no effect. Currently I can't lift my bird from the ground cause ICE freezes the creature to the ground. So how to realize a bird creature?

 

Does GAIA spawn animals?
I thought it was just a terrain generator.

In any event, go to your Creature Register in the scene, and find the creatures that you wish to spawn in the Register's inspector, then toggle the "pool" option and it will show you some spawn settings. I highly suggest that you only use Creature Prefabs, or deactivate the source creature in the scene, otherwise if the source creature dies, the ICE Spawner will no longer have a reference to the creature it is supposed to spawn.

 

Hi arnesso, as you might know you can define multiple spawnpoints for each reference group of the creatures, in which each point could represent a single object but also a group of objects with the same name or tag. While spawning a creature the register will randomize the defined spawnpoints but also the associated objects, so you could spawn these spawnpoint objects with GAIA to realize your desired goal.

Hope this will be helpfull to you ...

Have a great day!

Best regards, Pit

 

I'm sorry, the AVIAN type is inoperable in the current version. Birds and fishes will be full supported in the next version. You could handle flying creature by a small script which overrides the move position and if you are interisting in this I'll support you but if you can wait a while the update is nearly finish and I'll provide you the release as soon as possible.

Have a great day!

Best regards, Pit

 

Thank you Pit, I will postpone the birds, have you any idea when the new release will come?

 

please can you give me the best configuration that let the zombie walk and when the distance between him and the player became smaller THE zombie Run and when the distance became more smaller the zombie do the attack animation !

 

Hi,

My creature patrols, set this up under the missions tab. Under Interaction tab, Act 1, when a player is within 30, creature runs at player. Act 2, walk, when creature is within 4 (note the AND rule this stops Act1 and Act 2 running at the same time.) Act3, when within 2, creature attacks. Obviously setup your behaviors run/walk/attack..

note priorities as well..

not exactly what you wanted, but some clues..hope it helps.

Regards

 

Hi, i just bought ICE Creature Control, I am testing a monkey and When I collide with the monkey it does not flee from my player.

 

Okay, so I decided to try and fix my walking in place problem by trying A* Pathfinding Pro, with quite a bit of success.
My agents no longer walk in place.
However, now they do not do a very good job of detecting other agents via interactors, at least not when a distance limit is placed on them.
Even with a distance of 50, and no FOV and Visual requirement, my creatures will no longer sense one another unless they are right on top of each other.

Could this be an issue with distance checking with the A* adapter?

 

Hi TonanBora, I have try to reproduce your issue and have found a problem with spawned creatures which detect the targets correctly (selected targets are green indicated in the inspector view) but don't receives path informtation from A* seeker. If I start the same scenario with scene objects everything works as expected, so it seems to be a problem with the A* Adapter and creatures which will inititialized during the runtime. I'll fix this issue asap and will provide you an update of the adapter - should be available within the next hours.

Have a great day!

Pit

 

@icetec
Okay, I think I narrowed down the problem with my AStar creatures not detecting one another.
I have figured out, that it is the Visibility Check that is causing them to not interact with one another.

I am using the RVO simulator, and have RVO controllers on the creatures, could this be blocking the visibility check?

 

So, not sure which developer to raise this question too, so I figure I would contact you both.

I am trying to use AStar RVO with the normal AStar pathfinding.
The AI avoid intersecting one another, and run about quite smoothly, however, once a fair number of AI Units begin trying to move to the same general area, they start freaking out, and moving back and forth, and from side to side, some even run back the way they came:

Any clues or ideas on what might be causing this?
Could it be that the RVO senses a collision course, and tries to locate another route?

 

Hey everyone. Been reading this forum for a while and still haven't found a solution for what i want to do. If someone could please point me in the right direction i would be most appreciative. so far i am very happy with my purchase of this software and i am very happy with how intuitive it is and really happy with the behavior of my creatures, but i can not figure out how to make a creature "eat" or feed on a specific item and for that food to disappear after it has been devoured. And also simply for one creature to attack another and apply damage to it so that it dies. and also i am using the unity first person controller. so is it advised to buy UFPS so that i can pass damage to the player? Thank you very much. Regards Tristan

 

Okay, so I got a reply back from Aron, the creator of AStar, and he said:

I am not using the "SnapToNode" option mentioned, so it is not the seeker (that I am aware of).
I have tried disabling the RVO, and the AI still flailed about, unsure of where to go.
So I guess it is not actually the RVO causing the issue, seems odd though that the AI only starts misbehaving when there is a larger number of AI units moving in the same direction.

 

Hi TonanBora, could you post a video which shows the movement gizmos of some of your creatures (show debug). It looks like that the obstacle avoidance of ICE is active, detect other creatures as obstacles and change the path to avoid collisions. In this case you could reduce the range of the scanning area or deactiavte the internal obstacle avoidance or remove your creature layer from the obstacle layer list (Essential Settings).

 

I could post a video of that, however due to the number of AIs, this would cause sever lag as the Editor tries to Update, and draw all of the gizmos.
My creatures do not have their layers set in the obstacle layer:


If you would still like the video, I could still make one, and hope it is not too laggy to tell what is happening.

 

Hi Psynaptix,
to teach your creature to drink water if it's thirsty, simply prepare the water sources (e.g. GameObjects with DrinkingWater as tag or as unique name), add a target script (e.g. ICECreatureLocation) to these objects and assign one of them as reference to the register. Now open the INTERACTION settings of your creature, add a new interactor for your DrinkingWater objects and define the desired selection criteria (e.g. selection range 30 AND OwnThirsty > 30). Please note that these interactor will need two rules - one rule your creature need to run to the well and a second rule for its drinking behaviour.

Please note that your creature will leave the well in this example if its thirty value is lower or equal 30, if you want that your creature will drink until its thirty value is zero, you could activate favoured in its drinking behaviour to hold this behaviour for specific time or you could also add additional selection criteria to hold the target if the thirty value is larger than zero.

I hope this will be helpful to you but please feel free to contact me whenever you have a question or runs into a problem with ICE.

Have a great day!

Pit

 

Bassically a creature will running from A to B to reach the given TargetMovePosition but there are several settings to modify this this behaviour (e.g. Move Segment Length etc.) and also several influences which could affect the path (e.g. obstacle avoidance, interactions with other objects etc.)

The Essential Settings seems to be okay, but please check 'Update Position on ...". TIMER is active, therefore your creature will update their home positions currently every 5-15 secs. but apart from that, it seems that creatures of the same species interact each other. Could it be that your Black Knight and Babarian character using interactor rules for their own species, this would be okay, but to eliminate this factor please deactivate such interactions temporäry. Also it could be that your creatures don't use the Default Move of the Essential Settings. As you know, you could modify the movements for each behaviour rule and maybe their is one behaviour rule with CUSTOM MOVE settings which cause this freaky behaviour.

If you want we could arrange a team viewer session so we can check the settings in realtime ...

 

@icetec
Thanks again for all your help Pit!

I have to say, that out all the assets I have used, this one has to have one of the BEST support.

Sorry I keep asking question, and running into unique problems.

 

are there any script sample demos for the system so we can be able to use custom behavior to tweak.
and also i dont understand use of playmaker plugin i did not find any actions in the actions window.

i want to setup human player behaviour i dont find good tutorial on that can you make a tutorial explaining the various features that in the plugin.
since in your tutorial you have shown how to setup the ai and did not go through how all the features work.

looking for good tutorial.

 

Hi Kumar,
here you can find some great PlayMaker actions for ICE http://roskdproductions.weebly.com/ice-creature-control-playmaker-actions/intro and I'll provide more demo scenes and tutorials with the next update. Also please feel free to contact me whenever you have a question or runs into a problem with ICE and in urgent cases you can contact me also via skype.

Have a great day!

Pit

 

More tutorials is always welcome, especially video tutorials. The lack of tutorials is the only reason why I don't use ICE despite owning it.

 

i am waiting for good tutorials for making ai behavior for ai for humans where player will go hide and try to attack the player.

i dont know if it was wise to ask fps ai but i am big fan of counter strike AI.

if you have possibility of making ai interaction between humans it will be great.

EX:

if AI detect an enemy it will go towards enemy and try to make dog fight with the enemy and kill with sword.
can we setup ik for ai ? or we have to use human ik system from asset store.

 

Agree here. I'm trying to wrap my head around ICE. The two quick start videos are nice, but it would be great to have more in-depth walk through videos on specific configurations that do not use the wizard. For example, maybe setup of home areas that we could then add into our scenes via spawners that look at environmental criteria such as terrain height, proximity to certain game objects, etc. The wizard just seems to randomly throw them into the scene. A set of videos showing the manual configuration for each ICE component type would be useful.

 

Hello icetec,

I've just bought this asset and am toying with it trying to learn the ropes.
I believe I've come across an inconsistency.
The Animation combobox in behaviors section seems to be populated with animation names, but when the animation is actually triggered at runtime, a function is called (CrossFade) which takes animator state name as a parameter.
This forces us to use the same names for states in the Animator as the names of the associated animations, which is not ideal.
Or am I missing something?

 

Hi dukester, while using Mecanim with the DIRECT mode, states and motions should have the same name, otherwise you could get conflicts with invalid indices. This is already fixed in 1.2 but for now you could use the ADVANCED mode to steering the controller by using paramater or you could create a new controller with all your desired animations, here you don't need to create transitions, just drag and drop the desired animations on it, so states and animations will have the same name.

I hope this will be helpful to you but please feel free to contact me whenever you have a question or runs into a problem with ICE.

Have a great day!

Pit

 

Hi guys, you are absolutely right and as soon as the update is online I'll start to create more tutorials and demo scenes. Version 1.2 comes with a lot of improved and new features and includes also new demos scenes, so please give me a while to finish the update. But it would be great if you could send me a wish-list of tutorials you would like to see, this would help me to appraise the relevance of a topic and if there is an completly unclear feature I could handle this directly.

Have a great day!

Pit

 

Hi kumar, do you want something like this?
http://www.icecreaturecontrol.com/files/webplayer/ICECreatureControlDeathmatchTutorial.html

​

ICE works well with runevision's Locomotion System and Ootii's Bone Controller and should be ready support also other IK assets (for this you could set the animation type to CUSTOM, so the IK controller could handle the animation for the given behaviour)

 

Since it's fixed for 1.2 it's not a problem for me to wait. Like I said, I'm just toying with it for now.
I would prefer to setup the behavior anims by the animator state names because in my project I plan to have many different types of enemies and I'd like to standardize their behaviors (basically use one behavior for many different types of enemies), so their animators would all have standard named states (Idle, Walk, Run, Attack, ...), but the actual animations for those states would be different (for example, SwordIdle, MaceIdle, DualSwordIdle, SwordAndShieldIdle,...).
I've already noticed that I don't need transitions for the animator while using DIRECT mode in ICE, which suits me just fine.