Unreal Engine 4 AI Programming Essentials

Create responsive and intelligent game AI using Blueprints in Unreal Engine 4

About This Book

• Understand and apply your Game AI better through various projects such as adding randomness and probability, and introducing movement
• Configure and debug Game AI logic using multiple methodologies
• Bridge the gap between your knowledge and Game AI in Unreal Engine 4

Who This Book Is For

This book is for programmers and artists who want to expand their knowledge of Game AI in relation to Unreal Engine 4. You are recommended to have some experience of exploring Unreal Engine 4 prior to this book because we jump straight into Game AI.

What You Will Learn

• Understand the fundamental components of Game AI within Unreal Engine 4
• Skillfully introduce Game AI within Unreal Engine 4
• Configure, customize, and assign Navigation and AI components to your pawn
• Create, debug, and analyze Game AI behavior
• Design responsive Game AI using the Behavior Tree methodology
• Create smart objects designed to interact with AI
• Utilize advanced AI features within your project to maximize the user experience

In Detail

Unreal Engine is a powerful game development engine that provides rich functionalities to create 2D and 3D games. Developers have the opportunity to build cross-platform mobile and desktop games from scratch. This book will show you how to apply artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to your Unreal project using blueprints as your scripting language. You will start with an introduction to AI, and learn how it is applied to gaming. Then you’ll jump right in and create a simple AI bot and apply basic behaviors to allow it to move randomly. As you progress, you’ll find out how to implement randomness and probability traits. Using NavMesh, you will impart navigation components such as character movement, MoveTo nodes, settings, and world objects, and implement Behavior Trees. At the end of the book, you will troubleshoot any issues that might crop up while building the game.

Style and approach

This easy-to-follow project-based guide throws you directly into the excitement of Game AI in an approachable and comprehensive manner.

Author Biography

Peter L. Newton gravitated toward computers at a young age. As his appetite for technology grew, web applications were his first exploration into development. The excitement of programming is what kept Peter diving further into different software designs and programming patterns. He is a self-taught programmer who has spent countless hours in reverse engineering assembly and arm instruction executables just for the joy of learning. Peter has several years of experience as a web developer, software developer, database architect, and hardware technician. His recent years were dedicated to the Virtual Reality/Gaming industry experience, working with such companies as Create, Sony Pictures, and the developers of Unreal Engine 4, Epic Games.
Peter’s most recent VR project was Can You Walk The Walk?, which won Digital Hollywood’s “Best In Virtual Reality Based on a Cinematic or Television Experience” award. Jie Feng is originally from Jiaxing, China. He is currently a PhD candidate at Columbia University, specializing in machine learning and computer vision. He has conducted research on problems ranging from detecting and recognizing objects in images and retrieving similar images from large-scale databases to understanding human behavior in videos. Jie’s work has been published at top international conferences, and he has been granted a U.S. patent. He is also a software designer and developer and has worked at Microsoft, Amazon, and Adobe. Jie is passionate about applying Artificial Intelligence to real-world problems. His project using Microsoft Kinect to analyze motion for fitness has won People’s Choice Award at Innovative Health Tech NYC competition, 2013. Jie is currently working on a fashion discovery product named EyeStyle.
Video games are the very thing that motivated him to study computer science. His favorite genre is action adventure. Titles including Resident Evil, Tomb Raider, and Uncharted inspire him in innovative thinking. This book is a unique experience for Jie to put his knowledge on Artificial Intelligence to game design and examine the potential of creating intelligent characters using Unreal Engine 4.