Understanding the Blackboard
In Unreal Engine, the Blackboard is a crucial component of behavior trees; it acts as a memory space – some sort of brain – where AI agents can read and write data during their decision-making process. This means that developers will be able to query and update information stored within it.
The Blackboard is created as a Blackboard Data asset, which will be assigned to a behavior tree, and it contains a set of variables – named keys – that store specific information of predefined types. These keys can be accessed and manipulated during runtime to influence the decision-making of AI characters.
Figure 7.10 – Blackboard example
A key can be set to Instance Synced; in this case, the key itself will be synchronized across all instances of the Blackboard. This synchronization ensures that any changes made to the value of the key will be reflected consistently across all instances of the AI agents...
