ROOTS: An Open Source tool for authoring Behaviour Trees in a visual way inside of Unity

Abstract

The current document tries to document the whole process of developing an editor tool for the Unity Game Engine, in particular, a node-based GUI for authoring Behaviour Trees which can be used for driving the decision making process of agents. The paper’s main objective is to expose the inner working systems for people who are interested in extending and improving the different features of the tool. Unreal Engine has a great native tool for authoring behavior trees but Unity doesn’t, nevertheless, there are premium and feature-rich tools available in the asset store. However, none of them are open-source projects resulting in a difficult customization of the tool for the different project needs. Unity and Unreal are the most well-established and biggest game engines in the market, and as such, developing a non-existing solution for this problem could be a very successful movement. ROOTS, will be an open source project, and it’s code will be publicly hosted at Github. Despite the nature of an open-source project, which implies that you don’t get revenue from licensing the product, there are always other ways of profiting the development such as developing a proprietary extension for a client or via donations. Throughout the report the different achieved objectives and the future planed features will be discussed and reviewed.