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 basic AI


There are other forms of AI available. In this book, we created the basic AI. In the hierarchy of the components, there is a controller. The controller then decides which Behavior Tree to run. Then, tasks are chosen based on the sequence of decisions in the tree.

In the controller, we could have an array of different Behavior Trees suited for different tasks. Then, once we approach the task, the tree contains the subtask which aids in coming to a solution. Introducing this level of abstraction requires understanding of which state is necessary to enter.

We demonstrated how to create an AI basic enough to run indefinitely. Using math, we were able to help the AI avoid contacting walls. Presumably, this is all you need for some scenarios. If you need your units to all run independently of each other and avoid the walls as necessary, this script will be perfect for you. However, if you need more control over your units, you can't achieve it with this technique alone.

The alternative...