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

The movement component


The movement component is the driving force behind animation. Similar to the other types of movement components, such as a vehicle's movement component, we will provide inputs, which will then communicate with other components in the backend to properly simulate animation or gear ratio changes. What this means is that other functions can also influence the pawn that has the movement component. So, if our Behavior Tree tells the AIController to focus on another pawn, the AIController will influence the direction that the pawn it possesses is facing. This means wonders for not having to explicitly tell your pawn this information.

The AIController

We previously used the AIController to move our pawns in Chapter 2, Creating Basic AI, and Chapter 3, Adding Randomness and Probability, but never took the time to understand what's happening within Unreal Engine 4 to make it happen. Having this understanding allows you to expand on movement components when, for example, you want...