EQS: Queries and Their importance.

Hello!

We are a small 13 men team working on a videogame for Sony. The name is Intruders: Hide and seek. You can see the tráiler of our early work on YouTube. Im giving you this information cause I would love to get some advice regarding queries that could apply to our specific type of game.

It would be incredible, to just have a conversation about this with anywone that has used EQS before.
We are investigating how it could enhance the AI in a game of our characteristics.

Our game is heavily based on scripted events which are triggered in various manners to advance the story. It is heavily a narrative experience, but of course, enemies have considerably complex AI.

The thing I see, is that the AI we have must be constricted by design

  • Move between certain established waypoints until enemy is alerted by player, then seek, and attack.

Of course the AI is much more complex than that, but up to this point, we have been able to expand it with BTTs without needing EQSs.

I guess the question would be, would EQS be useful for a stealth game with scripted scenes and very little room for variation in AI?

I understand EQS are mainly used to give enemies a more intelligent AI by applying “weights” relative to the ideal positions they should go to within a navmesh.
Perhaps EQS are not just for navigation purposes. Perhaps different checks can be done, which are an advantage over your regular decorators on the BTT.

I guess the best example of the type of game we are developing is Resident Evil 7 (We wish it ends up half as good…) - RE7 does not require complex aleatory patrolling like a shooter or a sandbox might. It is made out of precise scripted scenes and waypoints and moveto player.

We are looking into EQS mainly cause the branching in our BTTs is slightly getting out of control. We feel its getting too convoluted and its not elegant any more.

And if EQS is not the answer to our problems, we would love to know if there is a good alternative to BTTs for relatively complex AI, or if there is standard propper way to modularise BTTs in order to have them as neatly structured as posible. Ultimately, we are looking to massively simplify and improve our game architecture. We are developing the game in Unreal Engine, of course.

Any advice is enormously appreciated!!

Wow, well formed question. Sadly, no one ever responded. Did you ever end up employing EQS?