Does Model-View-Controller Play Nicely with Artificial Intelligence and Behavior Trees?

Question

I come from an MVC background (Flex and Rails) and love the ideas of code separation, reusability, encapsulation, etc. It makes it easy to build things quickly and reuse components in other projects. However, it has been very difficult to stick with the MVC principles when trying to build complex, state-driven, asynchronous, animated applications.

I am trying to create animated transitions between many nested views in an application, and it got me thinking about whether or not I was misleading myself... Can you apply principles from MVC to principles from Artificial Intelligence (Behavior-Trees, Hierarchical State Machines, Nested States), like Games? Do those two disciplines play nicely together?

It's very easy to keep the views/graphics ignorant of anything outside of themselves when things are static, like with an HTML CMS system or whatever. But when you start adding complex state-driven transitions, it seems like everything needs to know about everything else, and the MVC almost gets in the way. What do you think?

Update:

An example. Well right now I am working on a website in Flex. I have come to the conclusion that in order to properly animate every nested element in the application, I have to think of them as AI Agents. Each "View", then, has it's own Behavior Tree. That is, it performs an action (shows and hides itself) based on the context (what the selected data is, etc.). In order to do that, I need a ViewController type thing, I'm calling it a Presenter. So I have a View (the graphics laid out in MXML), a Presenter (defining the animations and actions the View can take based on the state and nested states of the application), and a Presentation Model to present the data to the View (through the presenter). I also have Models for value objects and Controllers for handling URLs and database calls etc... all the normal static/html-like MVC stuff.

For a while there I was trying to figure out how to structure these "agents" such that they could respond to their surrounding context (what's selected, etc.). It seemed like everything needed to be aware of everything else. And then I read about a Path/Navigation Table/List for games and immediately thought they have a centrally-stored table of all precalculated actions every agent can take. So that got me wondering how they actually structure their code.

All of the 3D video game stuff is a big secret, and a lot of it from what I see is done with a graphical UI/editor, like defining behavior trees. So I'm wondering if they use some sort of MVC to structure how their agents respond to the environment, and how they keep their code modular and encapsulated.

Answer 1

"Can you apply principles from MVC to principles from Artificial Intelligence (Behavior-Trees, Hierarchical State Machines, Nested States), like Games?"

Of course. 99.9% of the AI is purely in the Model. The Controller sends the inputs to it, the View is how you represent it on the screen to the user.

Now, if you want to start having the AI control something, you may end up nesting the concepts, and your game 'model' contains a Model for an entity, a Controller for the entity which is the AI sending commands to it, and a View for the entity which represents the perceptions of that entity that the Controller can work with. But that's a separate issue from whether it can 'play nicely'. MVC is about separating presentation and input from logic and state and that aspect doesn't care what the logic and state looks like.