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

AI Perception components


There are two components that are currently available. The first one is what you're already familiar with: the AI Perception component. The other is the AIPerceptionStimuliSource component. The latter is used to easily register the pawn as a source of stimuli, allowing it to be detected by other AI Perception components. This comes in handy, particularly in our case. Now, follow these steps:

  1. With PlayerSense open, let's add a new component called AIPerceptionStimuliSource. Then, under the Details tab, let's select Auto Register as Source.

  2. Next, we want to add new senses to create a source for. So, looking at Register as Source for Senses, there is an AISense array.

  3. Populate this array with the AISense_Sight blueprint in order to be detected by sight by other AI Perception components. You will note that there are also other senses to choose from—for example, AISense_Hearing, AISense_Touch, and so on.

The complete settings are shown in the following screenshot:

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