Book Image

Unreal Engine 4 AI Programming Essentials

By : Jie Feng, Peter Newton
Book Image

Unreal Engine 4 AI Programming Essentials

By: Jie Feng, Peter Newton

Overview of this book

Unreal Engine is a powerful game development engine that provides rich functionalities to create 2D and 3D games. Developers have the opportunity to build cross-platform mobile and desktop games from scratch. This book will show you how to apply artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to your Unreal project using blueprints as your scripting language. You will start with an introduction to AI, and learn how it is applied to gaming. Then you'll jump right in and create a simple AI bot and apply basic behaviors to allow it to move randomly. As you progress, you'll find out how to implement randomness and probability traits. Using NavMesh, you will impart navigation components such as character movement, MoveTo nodes, settings, and world objects, and implement Behavior Trees. At the end of the book, you will troubleshoot any issues that might crop up while building the game.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Unreal Engine 4 AI Programming Essentials
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Goal


Our goal for this chapter is to place an AI character in the level that has the blueprint to instruct it to move randomly and indefinitely. We will demonstrate multiple techniques throughout this chapter to get a good grasp of some really basic AI techniques commonly featured in titles. These techniques are listed as follows:

  • First, we want to place an AI character, Hero, in the level that has the blueprint to instruct it to move randomly and indefinitely. We will achieve this by first creating a new third-person project and naming it appropriately. We will then use the default pawn provided from the sample content as the bot. We will create an AIController to control our pawn. We will then provide our AIController with instructions to move our bot randomly and indefinitely.

  • Second, we want to make the AI character follow some basic path. For example, we'll have the AI move along the walls in one direction. We can take our existing project and modify the AIController with new instructions...