SimBionic® is an award-winning AI middleware tool that simplifies the process of creating intelligent behavior for games and simulations. Using SimBionic, you can specify how game characters and simulated entities dynamically react to events and player actions. SimBionic enables everyone on the development team to write smarter behaviors that are more realistic, challenging, and engaging. By accelerating development and encouraging collaboration, SimBionic increases productivity and frees your team to focus on innovation.

What Is SimBionic?

SimBionic is a full-featured visual development environment including editor, debugger, and runtime engine. Its highly intuitive visual approach moves AI development out of the source code, making it possible for designers and subject matter experts to create AI behaviors without programming expertise. Using the SimBionic editor, you specify game AI by simply drawing it as a flowchart-like diagram.

The SimBionic runtime engine is a highly efficient C++ or Java library that uses the AI behaviors you create in the visual editor to dynamically control characters and objects within your game or simulation. The runtime engine provides an API that is both lightweight, for rapid integration with your game, and flexible, allowing you to choose exactly when SimBionic will run and how it will allocate resources.

The SimBionic interactive debugger is a full-featured debugging environment that enables you to find and fix bugs in your behavior logic by peering inside a running copy of the SimBionic runtime engine. With the SimBionic debugger, you can walk through a behavior step by step, inspecting data values and setting breakpoints to help track down subtle mistakes.

The SimBionic Development Cycle

SimBionic has something to offer at each stage of the development cycle. When you’re in pre-production, you can use SimBionic to mock up AI ideas and to work out the basic vocabulary your team will use to talk about your AI. You might even choose to integrate SimBionic with a prototype game engine to test out gameplay.

As you move into the design phase, you can design your characters’ behaviors directly in SimBionic rather than using a separate tool such as Visio or Word. If you’ve already prototyped some behaviors during pre-production, you can re-use those as a starting point for your design. Because SimBionic is a visual tool, it’s easy to gather the team around the monitor to critique potential behavior designs or hold “AI brainstorming” sessions.

When your team starts the actual implementation phase, your programmers will integrate the SimBionic runtime engine with your game engine. Once that’s done, you’ll be able to take the SimBionic behaviors you created in the design phase and run them directly in the game, without having to write any code! This eliminates the usual step of having programmers translate designers’ AI design documents into C++ or Java code, which is slow and prone to miscommunications. As a result, designers have more direct control over AI development, and valuable programmer time is used more efficiently.

Since a large chunk of the game development process is devoted to testing and refining the game, SimBionic provides plenty of support for this aspect of development. Because SimBionic doesn’t generate code, no recompilation is required when you make changes to your AI. This means shorter test-and-fix cycles, which in turn means higher productivity. When you run into bugs in your AI, the SimBionic interactive debugger makes it easy to connect remotely to your game and examine the current state of your characters’ behaviors. With the debugger, you can quickly track down the most pernicious problems with your AI.

Finally, after you’ve shipped your game and are preparing for your next title, you’ll probably want to re-use some of the AI you just developed. With SimBionic’s easy-to-understand visual behaviors and HTML documentation generation capabilities, new team members will spin up more quickly, while previous team members will find it easier to maintain and extend your existing AI libraries. This means that you can focus on reaching farther with each game rather than reinventing the wheel.