Having some fun using #UnrealEngine #StateTrees for non-AI releated.

#ue5 #gameplay #pawsintheshell #gamedev #book #cplusplus

okay after spending 3 days shoving them into my brain, i think StateTrees in UE5 are actually incredibly cool and my new favorite thing

It seems @jettelly.bsky.social is going to be seriously committed in publishing #UnrealEngine books. Just vote your favourite on IdeaLabs!

#GAS #UE5 #AI #StateTrees #Gameplay #gamedev

I've been jotting down a bunch of ideas, feature requests & bugs from the past few weeks of working with #unrealengine StateTrees:

timoxley.notion.site/Unreal-State...

Much of this will likely be obvious/todo but interested to hear thoughts cc @siggigg.bsky.social @jeanpaulsoftware.bsky.social

UE5 StateTrees are interesting conceptually -- e.g. with scoped data-binding, etc. I think where I'm struggling is UX. There's just a lot of mouse clicking.

We’ve been discussing character implementation lately.

A big shift: moving from hardcoded logic to statetrees.

Camera already runs on them—now it’s time for the character too.
It’s a massive step toward cleaner, scalable systems.

Structure matters.

#gamedev #UnrealEngine #indiedev #architecture

Oh fuck I get to work on my game today.

Deciding on what to work on between:
- Refactor AI to actually support what it'll need and use StateTrees
- Counterattack system (This game's superguard)
- Overworld-to-battle flow

StateTrees are probably actually ideal for what I'm doing :) I will try it both ways.

Neat! So far I'm handling most states with simple enums and trigger delegates when they change, but that isn't as clean if there are sub-states (which I luckily manage to avoid most of the time). Will have to check out StateTrees, looks useful for those rare cases with more complex hierarchies. :)

Right now I am doing what would be an "old" approach--state machine, BT, BB, EQS, etc. I have not used StateTrees yet but I will check them out! The Learning Agents I probably don't have a great use-case for at the moment. In my horror game, the AI only needs to be good at looking around and chase.

Note that the main features are:
Simulating large numbers of units with RTS-style states, all in StateTrees.
Easy VAT baking, with animations being blended.
Efficient rendering.
VAT Static Meshes to BP transitions.
Customizable abilities.
Select and move command.
StateTree examples.

Pretty nice presentation by Jeremy Choo (Ammobox Studios) on why, in some cases, you should prefer #StateTrees over #BehaviorTrees in #UnrealEngine: dev.epicgames.com/community/le...

#gamedev #ue5 #ai #artificialintelligence

When StateTrees first landed they sorely lacked debug visualization, so it was hard to follow the execution flow & grasp how they even worked, let alone debug any issues.

But in 5.4 they have new debug tooling, which is even better than that of BehaviorTrees:

dev.epicgames.com/documentatio... #ue

i am having fun mixing state trees and Mass code though. i really like how it feels to implement so far, and I think it should make more advanced composable behaviors easier too. Mass StateTrees also let you offload more state into fragments/components, making the code itself nicely stateless

@unrealdev.bsky.social thanks for bringing up StateTrees! I gave them a test run last night and this morning and they are great. When I was working in Unity I had a nice state machine I'd written, and this totally takes the place of that. I haven't tried replacing my enemy BT with it yet, but I will

This is a really good article on StateTrees in UE for anyone interested:
jeanpaulsoftware.com/2024/08/13/s...

it's so funny to me that even 2.5 years later, my Unreal Engine MassAI starter tutorial is seemingly still at the top of the results for videos on Ecosia, DuckDuckGo and Google.

What the hell, little ol' me and my crappy video with 2.3K views...