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

How Behavior Trees work

The easiest way to think about the role that a Behavior Tree assumes within our AI Agent is to imagine it as a brain. It makes decisions and, as a consequence, acts on them. It is the processor for the artificial intelligence within our agent. Before we get started, if you have any experience with Behavior Trees in other contexts, it is important to understand that they differ in the context of Unreal.

If you want to learn more about how they are different, you can do so by visiting the following link: https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/Engine/AI/BehaviorTrees/HowUE4BehaviorTreesDiffer.

It is, however, important to highlight one key difference here: Unreal Behavior Trees are read from the top to the bottom, and nodes will be executed from left to right. In other contexts, you might have found this to the other way around, in which the tree is read from...