Usage

The State Machine Unity project implements synchronous Finite State Machines in unity.

To use this project, you simply need to create a class or MonoBehaviour which implements one of the defined state machine types (such as FixedSM , FixedSMBehaviour , or FixedSMAnim see FSM Designfor more details.) and then define the relevant transitions, actions, events, and attributes of the state machine.

What is a FSM

A Finite State Machine (FSM) is an abstraction of how to organize a computation. A state machine is defined by a set of states and transitions and a given instance of said state machine can be in exactly one of the defined states. This can be a useful concept in game design as it allows for abstracting out some code patterns to be more easily organized and managed without having to create many nested if statements.

A simple example of a state machine is a Character Controller. The character controller could be defined as having a set of given states, possibly grounded and not grounded, depending on external input (such as a game world), the character would transition to not grounded upon leaving the ground and grounded upon being in the ground.

Why Use This Library?

I found myself re-creating a state machine over and over again in unity code or making many nested if statements. I could not find a simple, good solution to manage lots of states for many objects on the screen at once.

To solve this issue and cleanup some of my spaghetti code, I created this library to simply creation and management of state machines in C# for unity based off a similar architecture to the Coyote Framework. That framework is designed for large scale asynchronous communication projects of which most games are not. As they have different requirements, I defined this state machine project as a simplified version meant to run synchronously in games.

Example FSM

There is an example FSM explained in further detail in the Example FSM document.