We’re trying to have it run through a slate UI in UE4 but, at the moment we’re lacking resources (Particularly UE4 programmers) to do so. We do have plans to directly integrate blueprints into the system, but we’re unsure if we want blueprints to be interpreted by the AI engine, and have the AI engine spit out a correlating control schematic, or if we want most of the editing to be done in >DOT and have >DOT trigger blueprints within UE4.
If you mean to like create an entire system within UE4, I’d be skeptical. >DOT requires a build phase for the master entities (The entities that get inherited from) and once we add multilevel polymorphism that build phase is going to get a lot more complex. Multilevel polymorphism in this context means that the master entities can inherit from other master entities, which can inherit from a cluster of entities, which then can bypass a branch during data linking and only inherit some of the data being sent between two entities, or could even dynamically change what it inherits from during run time (This feature is my favorite). It becomes complete chaos compilation wise (But visually is very easy to grasp, even for non-programmers [We tested it on an English major]), which is why I’m considering delaying the video until after we finish up on that.
The closest we could do to what you’re hoping for is create a custom blueprint that runs during UE4 in editor build phase (I don’t know if that’s possible) and a custom type of node. Those nodes and blueprints don’t actually do anything besides get interpreted by the AI engine. That data gets sent to >DOT, and then can be edited and tested from >DOT. Once you finish that up, its sent back to UE4 and the build phase is finished.
It (the blueprint) would look something like this:
Following the chain, you can presume that Employees also contain Food and Water
Soldiers contain Food, Water, Money, Social and, Inv_ammo.
Etc.
Its very logical if viewed visually, but behind the scenes it drives the CPU insane during compiling. You can specify how much of each attribute the entity wants, which makes things even more chaotic, since that may not get carried through polymorphism.
Obviously actual scenarios are a lot more complex than this, since a particular chain can be at most 64,000 entities long (It gets maxed out by the limiting size of short, but tbh I’ve never had a longer chain than 20)
On another note, once multilevel polymorphism finalized, our system will actually look quite close to a flow graph. Only difference between a flow graph and how it’ll look, is you can attach nodes on the lines as well rather than just to other nodes. So it wouldn’t really be too big of a learning curve from UE4.
Another reason I’m considering waiting on doing a video for the editor is that we’re redoing the UI in HTML and CSS so that we can push front end updates without requiring a full redownload.