What this book covers
Chapter 1, Introduction to Game AI?, introduces the basic idea of AI and how it directly affects and enhances the gaming experience. You will learn the differences between the traditional and game-specific goals of AI.
Chapter 2, Creating Basic AI, helps you create your first AI step by step and talks about the techniques we will demonstrate along the way. We will dive right into Unreal Engine 4, using the bare components needed to create a single state with random movement for your AI.
Chapter 3, Adding Randomness and Probability, teaches you how to create random and probability techniques that can be used to add randomness, chance, and character to AI, which will make the game unpredictable and more interesting. We will cover how these are used within Unreal Engine 4.
Chapter 4, Introducing Movement, explains how to introduce movement to our AI characters within Unreal Engine 4. Path Finding will be used to allow our character to intelligently navigate within a level.
Chapter 5, Giving AI Choices, explains how to introduce autonomous behavior to our characters using Behavior Trees. Behavior Trees are a methodology that allows you to construct your AI logic visually in a tree structure and can be reused in different characters.
Chapter 6, How Does Our AI Sense?, explains how to use the different components available within Unreal Engine 4 to enable our AI to sense other AI and the pawns we will place within the world.
Chapter 7, More Advanced Movement, focuses on flocking and more advanced path-following behaviors. Flocking allows us to create group behaviors for several AI characters.
Chapter 8, Creating Patrol, Chase, and Attack AI, combines some of the components we used in the previous chapters, including AI Sense and Movement, to have our AI character navigate. Then, we will apply randomness to the time that the AI character will spend chasing after the characters it detects.
Chapter 9, What Have We Learned?, briefly glances over the previous chapters. We will also talk about additional examples of what we can achieve with these combined lessons.
