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

Path Finding


We will break the operation of Path Finding into different components that all work cohesively. The first component is NavMesh, which represents the traversable path. This isn't the only Navigable Mesh generation component, but this is also the most commonly used representation of the Navigable Mesh. Another component is NavMeshModifiers, which can serve different purposes. A few examples are as follows:

  • Influence Mapping: This allows you to feed the AI input information based on their location on NavMesh

  • Null Paths: These simply allow you to cut out areas of NavMesh

  • Allowed Paths: These simply allow you to block any AI that isn't allowed to navigate this area of NavMesh