ThinkEngine Description for Unity Asset Store

Describe your package. Is the provided content customizable, suitable for a particular genre?

ThinkEngine is a Unity asset that allows to integrate declarative AI reasoning modules in a videogame or whatever other kind of software developed in Unity. ThinkEngine has been developed having the integration of declarative ASP modules in mind, but other types of automated reasoning could be in principle wired (e.g., PDDL), with an effort which we are constantly working at making as light as possible.

AI reasoning modules, called brains, can drive NPCs or any other decision making process acting within a game scene.

Declarative-what?

Think at programming your PacMan AI with a few lines of statements like "Stay away from ghosts", "Eat dots", "Look for powerups whenever possible", "Chase ghosts when you're in powerup mode". No editing huge behavior trees, no manual crafting of finite state automata. That's the spirit of declarative languages: easy to design, easy to modify, you just state what you want, and not how to do it. That's a dream many AI researchers around the world strive to achieve.

Brains can be programmed in ASP-Core-2, the standard declarative language used in the Answer Set Programming community. We chose Answer Set Programming since we believe ASP is currently the closest thing to the dream of teaching a machine what to do without any programming effort, nor any training data, etc., but we aim at supporting other modelling tools, like PDDL.

How it works

Attaching a brain to a game is a three-step process:

• You wire sensors to the brain. Sensors are just property values of game objects or whatever value you want to observe in the game scene. Wiring can be easily done with a few clicks on the Object Inspector.
• You wire actuators from the brain to the scene, i.e. you choose which parts of the game scene will be affected by the brain's decisions. A brain can synthetize direct actions or more complex plans.
• You program your brain using an ASP statement file, usually called ASP encoding.

More demos, more detailed documentation, latest development versions and more can be found at our wiki