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Behaviour trees first attempt at implementing in F sharp

05 May 2014

Recently I saw a post about a simple FSM implementation in F# (link), and that got me thinking about our Behaviour Trees and how simple or complex it would be to implement them in F#.

##What are behaviour trees?

There is a longer intro to the topic here and a more extensive one in this paper. What I remember when I think about them is that there are 2 types of constructs:

Actions and conditions: Actions are changes in the game world such as animation plays, health decreased, etc. Conditions check certain states of the world.

Sequences and selectors: This is how we link and order the actions and conditions. Sequences pretty much are what your intuition tells you, they run a sequence of actions or conditions (they all need to return true). Selectors are the flipside of sequences, they run until something returns true.

To refresh the old noodle (ie: my brain) I implemented a very simplistic behaviour tree in C#. It looked like this (there are many classes in one file… you will survive), you can see it here

F# implementation

I tried starting implementing the selector, no luck. I couldn’t figure out what it should look like. Then I tried starting at the top, implementing the implementations of the actions mostly because it was the functions I knew how to implement, and they might guide me to somewhere interesting.

Turns out it pointed me to my total lack of understanding of the F# type system.

##Types

It turns out I had to leave my very practical approach to learning F# and go get my read on. I heard that F# has a pretty advanced type system, and I was just about to learn why.

Turns out there is an amazing series of posts about types by Scott Wlaschin. I think there is little point in my replicating what he said in worse prose :D, so go read that, and if you know of another cool link on the F# type system, please let me know by leaving a reply to this post.

Anyway, after a glance at the posts I think I need a discriminated union, or maybe a class but that feels dirty, of course I’ll have to try both.

[Here I took a rather long pause to go and read the posts properly and then do the Koans on records and classes to get my brain warmed up,]

Then I attempted to implement the tree again but getting stuck again. I decided some procrastination might help so, I went to look for some implementations of BT in every functional language I could think of and found these one in clojure (I think these might be slightly different Behaviour Trees), and this one in common Lisp.

I am going to leave this for today but will return with a solution as soon as I get one.

Categories:   programming   development   f sharp

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