In this chapter, we will create our first AI step-by-step and talk about the techniques that we demonstrate along the way. So today, we will dive right into Unreal Engine 4 using the bare components needed to create a single state with random movement for your AI. We will then review what we've done, the changes we can make, and the disadvantages of the techniques demonstrated.
This chapter will cover:
- Setting up our project
- Creating the AIController
- Sending instructions to Pawn with the AIController
- Creating small blueprint scripts to assist in navigation
Our goal for this chapter is to place an AI character in the level that has the blueprint to instruct it to move randomly and indefinitely. We will demonstrate multiple techniques throughout this chapter to get a good grasp of some really basic AI techniques commonly featured in titles. These techniques are listed as follows:
- First, we want to place an AI character, Hero, in the level that has the blueprint to instruct it to move randomly and indefinitely. We will achieve this by first creating a new third-person project and naming it appropriately. We will then use the default pawn provided from the sample content as the bot. We will create an AIController to control our pawn. We will then provide our AIController with instructions to move our bot randomly and indefinitely.
- Second, we want to make the AI character follow some basic path. For example, we'll have the AI move along the walls in one direction. We can take our existing project and modify the AIController with new instructions. From there, our AI will now move along the walls in one direction indefinitely.
- Third, we want to make a new enemy AI character that will chase the first AI character we made—that is, Hero.
Enemy will simply be instructed to move toward Hero every second.