Book Image

Hands-On Artificial Intelligence with Unreal Engine

By : Francesco Sapio
5 (1)
Book Image

Hands-On Artificial Intelligence with Unreal Engine

5 (1)
By: Francesco Sapio

Overview of this book

Learning how to apply artificial intelligence ( AI ) is crucial and can take the fun factor to the next level, whether you're developing a traditional, educational, or any other kind of game. If you want to use AI to extend the life of your games and make them challenging and more interesting, this book is for you. The book starts by breaking down AI into simple concepts to get a fundamental understanding of it. Using a variety of examples, you will work through actual implementations designed to highlight key concepts and features related to game AI in UE4. You will learn to work through the built-in AI framework in order to build believable characters for every game genre (including RPG, Strategic, Platform, FPS, Simulation, Arcade, and Educational). You will learn to configure the Navigation, Environmental Querying, and Perception systems for your AI agents and couple these with Behavior Trees, all accompanied with practical examples. You will also explore how the engine handles dynamic crowds. In the concluding chapters, you will learn how to profile, visualize, and debug your AI systems to correct the AI logic and increase performance. By the end of the book, your AI knowledge of the built-in AI system in Unreal will be deep and comprehensive, allowing you to build powerful AI agents within your projects.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: The Unreal Framework
9
Section 2: Designing and Implementing Behavior Trees
13
Section 3: Debugging Methods
14
Debugging Methods for AI - Logging

Designing Behavior Trees - Part III

This chapter is a continuation of the previous one, and is the final part of Designing Behavior Trees. We will finish what we started. In particular, we will build the final Behavior Tree and make it run.

In particular, we will cover the following topics:

  • Generating the Blackboard and the Behavior Tree assets
  • Setting up the Blackboard so that it can be used with the Behavior Tree
  • Implementing the Behavior Tree (using either the Blueprint or C++ nodes) to make a Chasing Behavior
  • Making the Behavior Tree running (both in a Blueprint or C++)
  • Improving the C++ nodes of the Behavior Tree to better align with best practices

Once again, we will be implementing everything in both Blueprint and C++ to give you a broader idea of what you can use. Alternatively, if you already know what you want to use, you can just follow one of the two implementations...