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

Overview


In this chapter, movement will be the main goal. How we achieve movement or use other tools to introduce movement are the questions we have to ask. Now that you're comfortable with some of the tools we use in AI, we have to make the AI capable of its most common action: movement. The system we use to introduce movement into AI is called Path Finding.

The way Path Finding works is by getting positions within the space designated as traversable. These start and end positions are fed to a function that computes the shortest path between the two positions. The algorithm uses relative position information, such as whether or not it is blocked by an object or actor, and prevents this position from being traversable. This is extremely useful when trying to generate a path in a world with dynamically moving objects.