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 patrol, chase, and attack AI


We demonstrated how to create AI that will patrol between waypoints you lay within the world. Then, if you ever get in sight of the AI, it will immediately begin to chase you. If you are within the attack range of AI, it will shoot its laser!

I believe each component has its strengths and that they create the most intelligent and responsive AI together. After creating AI without Behavior Tree, you start to wonder whether it's truly necessary to use. The problem dictates the solution, and when you use one solution for every problem, you don't solve anything. I find that using the strengths of Behavior Tree and other components to fill in the weakness results in the most promising behavior.

The pros and cons of using Behavior Tree

The following are the pros:

  • It is easily extensible

  • It syncs the Blackboard instances

The following are the cons:

  • The design dictates the execution flow

  • Setup is required

The pros and cons of using blueprint for AI

The following are the...