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

A quick recap on Behavior Trees

Here is a quick recap on Behaviors Trees to refresh you.

A Behavior Tree is a structure for decision-making which uses a Blackboard as its memory. In particular, the flow starts from a special node called the Root, all the way down to the leaves, which are called Tasks. A Task is a single action that the AI can take/perform.

Then, all the nodes that are non-leaves (or the root) are Composite. A composite node chooses which one of the children to execute. The two main Composite nodes are Sequence (which tries to execute all the sequences of its children in order, and if they succeed, it reports a success back, otherwise it reports a fail) and Selector (which tries each child until it finds one that succeeds and reports a success or all of them fail and it reports a fail).

Both Composite and Tasks nodes can use Decorators (which impose conditions...