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

Creating Behavior Tree


Moving onto Behavior Trees, let's begin to construct our first tree! In this project, we will create AI that resembles the behavior of a neighborhood dog. It will change its behavior state randomly every so often and continue to search for any mailman, who may loiter by its dog pin.

This will touch on using Environment Query System (EQS), which is still an experimental but powerful feature in Unreal Engine 4. It will be responsible for handing the dog a new position to search for the mailman in. So, if you're ready, let's open up a new Third Person project.

Let's create a few things for our dog to route between. The following are the steps to do so:

  1. First, let's make a new custom Target Point class and name it Foodbowl.

  2. Next, let's make a new custom Target Point class and name it DogHouse:

  3. Place these two actors accordingly within the world. We will use these to reference our dog where to move to when in the appropriate state. So, basically, we will use Target Points or...