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

Extending Behavior Trees

Empowering a tree with more leaves and branches will make it unstoppable.

In this chapter, we will understand how to extend Behavior Trees by implementing our custom Tasks, Decorators, and Services.

Since in chapters 8, 9, and 10 we are going to create a concrete example of a Behavior Tree from scratch and create custom Tasks, Decorators, and Services, you can look at this chapter as a quick theoretical introduction to those chapters in order to give you a ground base for extending Behavior Trees. Thus, this chapter might be super fluid and repetitive, but it will teach you about a great tool, which we will refine later in this book in a more playful way.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • How to create a Task, both in Blueprint and C++, to make our AI agent capable of executing custom actions.
  • How to create a Decorator, both in Blueprint...