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

Summary


Let's take some time to briefly talk about what we did in this chapter. First, we set up our agents to bounce off walls. This allows us to watch the agents simulate movement and how the four behaviors would affect them. Next, we will implement the Follower and Leader behavior, and this creates groups within the agents during simulation.

The last thing we did was implement the flocking movement, which is broken up into three different behaviors. The first behavior is Alignment, and it is responsible for aligning agents with nearby agents. The second behavior is Cohesion, and it is responsible for directing agents towards the center of the nearby agents. The third behavior is Separation, and it is responsible for directing the agent away from nearby agents.

Then, we simply created a UI to control the weights we created in the course and reset the agents at any time during the simulation.

Now that we are done covering different movement behaviors, it is time we combined all that we demonstrated...