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

Different Teams

As the AI perception system that's built into Unreal goes, AIs and anything that can be detected can have a team. Some teams are against each other, whereas some are just neutral. As a result, when an AI comes to perceive something, that something can be Friendly (it is in the same team), Neutral, or an Enemy. For instance, if an AI is patrolling a camp, we can ignore Friendly and Neutral entities, and focus only on Enemies. By the way, the default settings are to perceive only enemies.

The way in which you can change which kind of entities an AI can perceive is through the Detecting for Affiliation settings of Sense:

This provides three checkboxes where we can choose what we would like that AI to perceive.

There are 255 teams in total, and by default, every entity is within team 255 (the only special team). Whoever is in team 255 is perceived as Neutral...