Book Image

Unreal Engine 4 Game Development Quick Start Guide

By : Rachel Cordone
Book Image

Unreal Engine 4 Game Development Quick Start Guide

By: Rachel Cordone

Overview of this book

Unreal Engine is a popular game engine used by developers for building high-end 2D and 3D games. This book is a practical guide designed to help you get started with Unreal Engine 4 and confidently develop interactive games. You’ll begin with a quick introduction to the Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) ecosystem. Next, you’ll learn how to create Blueprints and C++ code to define your game's functionality. As you progress, you’ll cover the core systems of UE4 such as Unreal Motion Graphics (UMG), Animation Blueprints, and behaviour trees to further build on your game development knowledge. The concluding chapters will then help you learn how to use replication to create multiplayer games. By the end of this book, you will be well-versed with UE4 and have developed the skills you need to use the framework for developing and deploying robust and intuitive games.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

Behavior Trees

Behavior Trees act as flowcharts to determine the actions of an AI. Much like the Animation Blueprint, we can use external variables to determine which paths the Behavior Tree takes.

To see this in action, let's create our own Behavior Tree and replace the simple code we've created for our AI with it.

Creating and running a Behavior Tree

Behavior Trees are created like most other assets, so let's head into the Content Browser:

  1. Go to the ThirdPersonBP\Blueprints folder.
  2. Right-click, and, under the Artificial Intelligence section, select Behavior Tree.
  3. Name it EnemyBehavior.
  4. Before we start using this asset, let's set up our EnemyController to use it. Open the EnemyController blueprint.
    ...