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

Summary


In this chapter, we covered the different tools that allow us to control and influence the behavior of our AI's movement using NavModifierVolumes and other recast properties. We also learned how to tell our AI's controlled pawn to navigate to the waypoints that belonged to them. Lastly, we covered more fundamentals, such as the pathing algorithm originally created by Edsger Dijstkra. Next, we learned that we can optimize his original algorithm in favor of performance and resources and achieve this through heuristics.

In the next chapter, we will create a behavior tree and adapt what we've learned from the previous chapters to create some interesting AI interactions. We will also take advantage of the sensory system provided in Unreal Engine 4.