Comparing AI solutions
Each AI has its own strengths and weaknesses, ranging from price to flexibility to designer friendliness. Also, each AI has more than one way to accomplish this chapter's task of moving a character from point A to point B. We selected paths that were faster and easier to start with, but keep in mind that each of them has plenty of flexibility. All three proved to work well as terrain/trees as well as simple planes and cubes.
Experiences of working with all three:
- Quick Path is a good choice for a beginner. It has the fewest steps to do to get going, and works easily. Quick Path is focused on just pathfinding and the others are larger AI systems that can be expanded to many more areas because of their use of behavior trees.
- RAIN has many features beyond pathfinding that we will discuss in future chapters. The learning curve for RAIN is higher than Quick Path and unlike other AI solutions, the source code is unavailable, but it is a good all-round solution for game AI. And while RAIN has the ability to be customized through user-defined scripts, the focus is on easy AI setup through the Unity GUI without needing to write scripts often.
- React includes a behavior, but requires more code to get it running, which is good if you are interested in coding more. You build all the actions it can use, and let the designers focus on the tree. RAIN can do this too, but with React, you are building the blocks from square one.
Overall, the best AI for you is the one best suited for your game and that you enjoy using. We will be looking at these three and other AI systems in detail throughout this book.
