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

Behavior Trees and Blackboards

A tree to decide how we should behave, a blackboard to remember it!

Welcome to Chapter 2, Behavior Trees and Blackboards. This is where things start to get a bit more interesting because we will learn how to use the two main Unreal AI Framework structures. First, we will look at Behavior Trees and learn all about their principal components, such as tasks, decorators, and services. Next, we will learn about Blackboards and how to integrate them with Behavior Trees. After we have covered this, will be able to set up AI controllers that use Behavior Trees, which is key in implementing the rest of the techniques in this book.

As you may notice, there is a pattern in which we first learn a little bit about the theory, and then we jump straight into practice to understand how it all works. This is a pattern that we will follow in each chapter. So, let...