This chapter will introduce the basic idea of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and how it directly affects and enhances the gaming experience. You will learn the differences between the traditional and also the game-specific goals of AI. We will introduce various techniques used in game AI, including navigation, Behavior Tree, sensor systems, and so on. You will learn in brief which tools we utilize for AI within Unreal Engine 4's editor. After this chapter, readers will gain a basic understanding of how AI can be applied to game development for a better gaming experience. The AI techniques that we will briefly cover here will be taught in the subsequent chapters.
When you first think of Artificial Intelligence, robots immediately come to mind. AI is derived from the idea of intelligence that helps living creatures make decisions. We take inputs, context, and our personal reasoning to decide on the actions we will perform. In AI, we try to virtually replicate this process to create systems that can have autonomous behavior. Assuming you have a fairly extensive gaming history, you would know that game AI is generally not smarter than some older games where your enemy may get stuck in a corner and fail to get out. Game AI now is by no means comparable to the general AI in scientific research. Game AI is designed to work in a well-controlled, predicable virtual world. It mainly consists of hardcoded rules to allow game actors to make proper actions corresponding to different situations. Game AI is meant to be fun, so it only needs to seem smart to the player within this context.
It is fair to say that AI is a very broad topic, so implementing every possible technique isn't the plan. So, it goes without saying that we will only cover what is necessary for you to create an awesome game AI. Keep in mind, though, that we will only touch on very specific game AI techniques; the world of AI is as vast as it is great.