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Hands-On Artificial Intelligence with Unreal Engine

By : Francesco Sapio

3 (4)

Buy this Book

Hands-On Artificial Intelligence with Unreal Engine

3 (4)

By: Francesco Sapio

Buy this Book

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.

Preface

Who this book is for

What this book covers

To get the most out of this book

Get in touch

Free Chapter

Section 1: The Unreal Framework

Making the First Steps in the World of AI

Before starting...

Prerequisites

Installing and preparing the software

Becoming an AI Game Developer

A bit of history

Planning our journey

Summary

Behavior Trees and Blackboards

How Behavior Trees work

Blackboards and their integration with Behavior Trees

Creating our AI project

Starting Behavior Trees from AI Controllers

Summary

Navigation

What to expect from a Navigation System

Unreal Navigation System

Generating the Navigation Mesh

Setting parameters for the Nav Mesh

Modifying the Navigation Mesh

Overriding the Navigation System

Summary

Environment Querying System

Enabling the Environment Querying System

Understanding the Environment Querying System

Exploring the built-in nodes

Visualizing Environment Queries

Creating components for the Environment Querying System

Summary

Agent Awareness

Perception of AI in video games

Overview of the Sensing System

The AIPerceptionComponent

Different Teams

The AIStimuliSourceComponent

Hands-on with the perception system – Sight AI Controller

Summary

Extending Behavior Trees

A quick recap on Behavior Trees

Creating a Task

Creating a Decorator

Creating a Service

Creating a Composite Node

Creating new type of nodes or new types of Trees

Summary

Crowds

Crowds in games

Crowds in Unreal

Reciprocal Velocity Obstacles (RVO)

Detour Crowd

Summary

Section 2: Designing and Implementing Behavior Trees

Designing Behavior Trees - Part I

The Expected Behavior

Building the Nodes

AI Controller

Summary

Designing Behavior Trees - Part II

Setting up the environment for testing the Behavior Tree

Service – Update Chasing Behavior

Summary

Designing Behavior Trees - Part III

Building the Behavior Tree

Running the Behavior Tree

Bug Correction

Improving further (C++ only)

Summary

Section 3: Debugging Methods

Debugging Methods for AI - Logging

Basic Logging

Summary

Debugging Methods for AI - Navigation, EQS, and Profiling

Debugging behavior trees

Profiling and visualizing environmental queries

Testing and visualizing the navigation mesh

Profiling AI

Summary

Debugging Methods for AI - The Gameplay Debugger

The anatomy of the Gameplay Debugger

Extending the Gameplay Debugger

Summary

Going Beyond

Why is psychology an important consideration for AI?

What we haven't covered in this book

Some useful resources

AI and philosophy

Goodbye

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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...