Book Image

Hands-On Artificial Intelligence with Unreal Engine

By : Francesco Sapio
5 (1)
Book Image

Hands-On Artificial Intelligence with Unreal Engine

5 (1)
By: Francesco Sapio

Overview of this book

Learning how to apply artificial intelligence ( AI ) is crucial and can take the fun factor to the next level, whether you're developing a traditional, educational, or any other kind of game. If you want to use AI to extend the life of your games and make them challenging and more interesting, this book is for you. The book starts by breaking down AI into simple concepts to get a fundamental understanding of it. Using a variety of examples, you will work through actual implementations designed to highlight key concepts and features related to game AI in UE4. You will learn to work through the built-in AI framework in order to build believable characters for every game genre (including RPG, Strategic, Platform, FPS, Simulation, Arcade, and Educational). You will learn to configure the Navigation, Environmental Querying, and Perception systems for your AI agents and couple these with Behavior Trees, all accompanied with practical examples. You will also explore how the engine handles dynamic crowds. In the concluding chapters, you will learn how to profile, visualize, and debug your AI systems to correct the AI logic and increase performance. By the end of the book, your AI knowledge of the built-in AI system in Unreal will be deep and comprehensive, allowing you to build powerful AI agents within your projects.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: The Unreal Framework
9
Section 2: Designing and Implementing Behavior Trees
13
Section 3: Debugging Methods
14
Debugging Methods for AI - Logging

Bug Correction

If you have though to have finished, well, that's not it. In fact, when designing a Behavior Tree, there must always be a phase of debugging and check if everything works as it should. Actually, on purpose I built the tree with something that doesn't work. Can you figure it out? Give it a try before keep reading.

The first problem is that, the Destination Key in the Blackboard, until the Player is not on sight, it will never get initialized. Moreover, there is another problem, when the AI enemy is seeking the Last Known Position of the player, but it is not reachable, it will fail the task. As a result, the sequence will not allow to go in the next Task to select a Random Destination. How can we fix this? Let's give it a try before we keep reading.

There are many approaches to this. For instance, you might have though to use the "Force Success...