Decision Making

There are many different decision making techniques, but for now we can look at them all as acting in the same way.

The character processes a set of information that it uses to generate an action that it wants to carry out. The input to the decision making system is the knowledge that a character possesses, and the output is an action request.

A wide range of decision making tools exist, from very simple mechanisms that can be quickly implemented to comprehensive decision making tools that require more sophistication but can support richer behaviors to complete programming languages embedded in the game.

In this section we'll look at two of the most common decision making techniques used for games development:

• State Machines
• Behavior Trees