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

What we haven't covered in this book

Well, pretty much everything!

Despite the many pages within this book, we have only just scratched the surface of this wonderful topic of AI in games. How many times did I say in this book "Unfortunately, this [insert topic] is outside the scope of this book"? Too many to remember. This is just for the built-in AI Framework of Unreal (for instance, we haven't covered how to properly extend Generators and Tests for EQS, or how to create a custom AI Sense). However, I strongly believe that this book gave you some solid foundation to iterate upon and keep learning the Unreal AI Framework. Hopefully, you will be able to use this book as a reference for your work in Unreal.

As much as I hope that this book has been helpful to set the first stone, the intention of this section is to indicate that the path is made of thousands...