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

Adding randomness and probability


In this chapter, we focused on adapting our previous example to implement randomness and probability. So, we focused on the pros and cons of randomness and probability. Randomness can overlap with probability if you predetermine the outputs. For example, if you want different animations to be played each time a player does a fist attack, you can have an array of different animations you randomly choose from. However, say that there are five available options; with this, you have a 20% chance of choosing any one of the available choices.

The pros and cons of using randomness

The following are the pros:

  • There is virtually no limit to the output

  • This introduces balance to systems

The following are the cons:

  • You must create a large output table for increased deviation

  • The paths are limited to control

The pros and cons of using probability

The following are the pros:

  • You can predetermine the output

  • You can dictate the frequency of output

  • You can introduce balance to systems...