Behavior Trees

Behavior trees are one of the main mechanics in Eldiron. They consist of a Behavior Tree node which has up to 3 nodes connected to its bottom terminals (the nodes get executed from the left to right).

Behavior Trees Behavior Trees

You would rename the behavior tree node based on the action this tree implements, like Look. You can implement and invent any action your character should execute via behavior trees. See the nodes section or watch my Youtube videos to learn more about the various behavior nodes availabe to you.

Type of Trees

You can mark a behavior tree node (and therefore the whole tree) in 3 different ways:

  • Always. For NPCs this tree get executed on every tick.
  • On Startup. This tree gets only executed on character startup.
  • On Demand. This tree gets only executed on demand, i.e. when called directly via the Call Behavior node.

When an action command is received from a client, Eldiron will execute the given tree of the same name, regardless of its type.

Active vs Passive

As described above, behavior trees execute commands, for example when you Look at something. But what if somebody looks at your character ? In this case the tree on the target is executed with the command name + " (P)" for passive, i.e. “Look (P)”. Note that for passive trees, the current character is the character looking at you, as you do not want to send a message to yourself, this is why we call this a passive tree.

System Trees

Each object in the Character view defines a character, which means that each behavior tree of that character is unique to that character, you cannot share behavior trees for characters.

However it would be a lot of work to create each character in the game from scratch. This is where the Systems view is for. The Systems view contains re-usable objects and trees. You can call a system tree with the Call System node.

System objects are also used to implement skills and to provide an inheritance mechanism for character races and classes. More about these later.