Rain AI is a free plugin tool for Unity3D developed by Rival Theory. It is an AI engine that is intuitive, flexible and powerful. It focuses on creating movement for an agent, creating behaviours for it, triggering animations, creating perception sensors, the ability to extend and create custom actions as well as accessing and manipulating the component from script as well as accessing information from script. This plugin also provides documentation on their website http://rivaltheory.com/wiki/start as well tutorial videos created by both the developers and users. With respect to our project we will be using RAIN to help facilitate the creation of the behaviour trees for the different entities.

It will prove to be important for us to learn the strengths and capabilities of this tool and decide quickly on whether it makes sense to use it in our project or if we should find another tool to use, find another tool to help with creating the behaviors, port our previous behavior tree into Unity or create a new one. From this decision we will be able to decide on how much time will be spent on this aspect of development.

One of the issues I am thinking about with using RAIN AI in our game is; that it is capable of doing a lot of the work with small amounts of coding, in this case we have to think about what else we can incorporate into the project, or restrain from using all of its features. Another issue is that since this tool is quite powerful and is able to perform a lot of actions we will have to perform some stress testing to avoid having an aspect or part of our game removed or finding solutions so our ideas can still be in the game.

To build some familiarity with this tool each of our members has taken on a particular aspect of the plugin; to understand it and provide a brief demonstration to explain it to the other group members next week. Through this all team members will have an understanding of most of the features the tool has, testing and creating a small prototype to fit with our project, and doing some self directed learning on something that we might use on future projects.

By next week we will be close to finalizing our design document, so that everyone is clear on what our outlook for what the final project will be and what it will contain, a decision on whether we will use this new plugin.