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

Introducing movement


We only covered movement for pawns because this book is just an introduction. However, if you had any interest in getting other pawn types to move, you have to recreate the junction box, which is the movement component. This movement component for a type of pawn is responsible for taking input delta and converting it into acceleration.

What this means for the car AI is first getting the direction from one point to another, resulting in the position direction. Then, we need to make this position direction relative to the car AI by subtracting it from the car AI's forward direction. This results in a direction delta, which can be applied to the car AI's direction.

You can do something similar in 3D space for a spaceship as well. What this means is that if you want to create a spider AI that can't be moved by the default movement component, then by creating a custom movement component, you can tell the spider AI to move anywhere you wish and still be able to integrate it...