Behavior Trees: Freeze in BehaviorTree#step() in certain conditions about gdx-ai HOT 3 CLOSED

TBH I don't think it's a good idea to make changes to avoid this kind of programming errors.
It would be like changing the while loop in Java by adding a timeout to remedy any condition always true.
Closing this for now. Feel free to reopen if I missed something.

from gdx-ai.

Well, yes and no.
My proposal wouldn't only apply to endless loops but anything that takes reasonably long.
I would think like having tick() only execute one leaf task (not guard) ever per tick.

I haven't thought this reasonably through but there don't have to be hard programming errors, but things that "take a while", think:

untilSuccess
   sequence
      TryUnlockDoor
      BlahBlah

I can imagine two things here:

1. Unlocking the Door takes a few tries or it is blocking (Status.RUNNING) for 5 seconds until the door is open.

Call this one mis-design, but when executing from the update loop, the whole game is frozen and thus the animation doesn't show a door opening. But there it gets worse:
2. When TryUnlockDoor requires update() to do something, say it starts a process and then update() is doing something every frame to open the door, until TryUnlockDoor succeeds.

Do you have another idea on how to completely bypass all these problems? Because I want my users to be able to add in behavior trees as well as I wouldn't know how to properly avoid these issues. Especially it seems like this kind of behavior depends on the "iterator" or decorator, because I am certain I already have some tasks which "block" for a few frames.

from gdx-ai.

Non sure what's your exact use case.
But it's very likely that one of the several BT constructs supported by gdx-ai might cover it.
For instanse, have you considered using parallel?
With its policies and orchestrators is likely the most powerful and versatile construct.

from gdx-ai.