Animal Behavior Kit - add a complete ecosystem to your game!

Community Showcase Game Development
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**The Animal Behavior Kit has been released in the Marketplace!! **

As a Thank You to the community’s support, I’m offering the kit at 25% off for the next 3 days!

Get it here - https://www.unrealengine.com/marketp…l-behavior-kit

Hey everyone,

I just wanted to share my progress for my current project - The Animal Behavior Kit!

**LATEST DEVLOG

Animal Behavior Kit - Showcase Level Walk-through - YouTube**

You can check out the rest of the devlogs here:

(Sorry for the length!)

**[Devlog 6 Teaser] Love is in the air this week! - YouTube

[Devlog 7] ABK - Better Population Control! - YouTube**

**[Devlog 13] ABK - Custom Animations! - YouTube

[Devlog 14] ABK - Performance improvements and code refactoring! - YouTube**

**[Devlog 15] ABK - Better Animations! - YouTube

[Devlog 18] ABK - Final improvements before submission! - YouTube**

Animal Behavior Kit

Goal:
The goal of this kit is to provide a fully-functional animal ecosystem for your game while keeping performance and flexibility in mind.

Description:
At a glance, the kit will include ground animals that behave as either prey or predators and go about their routines based on their preselected Active Behavior. Each animal can also have a specified Engage Behavior (like Flee or Attack) that will be triggered by AI Perception when it sees or hears another animal nearby. Ground Animals also have a basic Needs System (hunger and thirst) and can be part of a group. They can also be tamed and made into Player Companions.

There are also birds and fish that act appropriately using either solo behavior or flocking behavior (Reynold’s BOID algorithm).

More Details:

Ground Animals
Each ground animal can be either a Prey or Predator and has a variety of easily configurable Active and Engage Behaviors.

Active Behaviors:

  • Stay In Place
  • Go to Random Place within NavMesh
  • Go To Random Place within Bounds
  • Go to Random WayPoint
  • Follow a specific WayPoint Path
  • Go to nearby Point-Of-Interest
  • Go to Homebase

Engage Behaviors:

  • Ignore
  • Flee
  • Defend
  • Attack

Each behavior above has a variety of parameters that can be set per animal in your level.

Needs System
The ground animals have a basic Needs System that includes hunger and thirst and will actively search for nearby water or food when they need it. This behavior will interrupt their Active Behavior (roaming inside a volume for example)

Group Behavior
Ground animals also have the ability to stick together in groups via a Group Manager. This allows a pack of deer to stick together for example, or a pack of wolves to hunt together. Each group has a leader and the entire group shares the Engage Behavior and target (say one deer sees you approaching - the entire group is alerted and runs away from you).

Taming System
There is also a Taming System included for ground animals. You can use Bait to lure the animal and then while the animal is eating you can tame it. You can then give it a name and issue commands to it. The included Companion Commands are: Follow Me, Stay There, Go There, Attack!, You are free (frees the animal)

In addition to the above, you can customize each ground animal to react to specific tags, change speed and acceleration, and a variety of different settings regarding each system above.

Flying Animals
Come with 2 movement modes:

  • Solo - fly to random location within the designated volume (very efficient)
  • Flock - Use a modified version of Reynold’s BOIDs algorithm to create flocking behavior while keeping performance in mind
  • You can also customize a variety of parameters such as random size (to make each bird a different size), velocity, time at location, etc

Swimming Animals

  • Still in progress - will try to add 2 movement modes like the birds
  • Fish will have obstacle avoidance

Day / Night Cycle

  • Template comes with a simple Day/Night cycle BP - you can customize the in-game time that it takes for a full 24 hours to pass, as well as Day Start Time and Night Start Time
  • Animals react to time of day and can go to “rest” at night (deer go to sleep to their home base, birds go into their homebase at night). This basically means that animals that are active during the day will not be active at night.
  • You can also have nocturnal animals that are active at night (think about owls or predators that hunt at night). These animals will be at rest during the day.

Performance

  • Each animal checks the distance to the Player(s) (via tag) and if the Player is far away, the AI will deactivate saving processing power.
  • The distance can be customize per AI actor in the scene

Looking for Feedback!

Guys, this is still early in development and most systems are either In Progress or Not Started yet :).

If this looks interesting to you, or you would benefit from this kit, please let me know what you think! What behaviors would you want to see? What is this kit missing that you could use in your game? What systems would be most useful to you?

Thanks everyone!

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This kit will be very useful for alot of people. I have a very rough blueprint for fleeing in my game if you need some ideas. PM me

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Thanks hungn93! Its really good to hear that people will find this useful :). Thanks for the offer btw - I may PM you at some point if I can’t figure out the fleeing behavior the way I want!

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This looks like a really useful system… Will pick it up when it goes on sale. :smiley:

Got a few questions and some feedback -

  1. Will there be the ability to have air creatures hunt ground creatures and vice versa?
    Example: Having an Owl swooping down and catching a small rodent and eating it in order to fulfill its hunger need.
    Example: Having an frog catch a fly with its tongue in order to fulfill its hunger stat.

  2. Will there be death based the lack of the ability to fulfill the needs of the Animal?
    Example: A deer does not get to a water or food source in time and dies of dehydration or Hunger?

3 Are needs broken into their own components?
Because this would be really useful in making our own needs to customize this system.

  1. Would it be possible to have it so that when we enter an animals home it renders the animal or animals?
    This would be super useful for entering a dragons den in order to kill it while it sleeps for example.
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Hi @HeadClot - thank you for the support and feedback :slight_smile:

  1. Tbh, I didnt think about having a needs system for birds (or fish), but I like your suggestion about the bird hunting critters on the ground :slight_smile: I’ll add it to the list of features

  2. I dont have it implemented yet, but I’ll make sure you can choose whether they die or not from the needs system (already have death implemented just have to call a custom event!). So this will definitely be there!

  3. Hmm, are you saying that you want each need (hunger, thirst) to be its own component so you can pick and choose which need is active? Or are you saying that you want to be able to add custom needs to the system? This is good feedback - can you tell me a bit more about this?

  4. This would be easy to implement. So basically, you would like the option of activating a group of animals with a trigger right? That way you can set your group of spiders inside a cave, but only render / activate them when the Player enters the cave. If so, I’ll add it to the feature list :slight_smile:

I’m already thinking about how I can refactor the needs system to make it more modular and scalable - this way you can add it to birds and also potentially add more needs in the future.

This was really helpful - thanks HeadClot!

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Hey @CoquiGames -

In response to questions 3 and 4

  1. I would like to see both having needs broken down into components would be awesome as well as having a generic need component for making custom needs. :slight_smile:

  2. Yep that Is what I mean - Player enters a trigger and the creature or creatures are visible. I can see this being really useful for things such as caves full of bats for example.

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Hmm, will see how I can add generic needs to the kit - already have some ideas on how this can be done :slight_smile:

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Hey guys,

Quick update - I’ve added fish to the template!

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this is one of the most waited assets for me. Also do i need buy all animals differently for marketplace or is there any animals on that upcoming asset

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Hey Tero83,

Thank you for the kind words and encouragement! :). The kit will come with default animals found in various Epic free demos (Boy and his Kite, Landscape Mountains, etc). These animals come with basic animations and are OK to showcase the kit.

However, I would advice getting a good animal pack to suit your needs. I would recommend you start with this pack here - Animal Pack Ultra in Characters - UE Marketplace. Its very cheap and it comes with a nice variety of animals. I would also keep an eye out for other specific animal packs in the upcoming Marketplace sale :slight_smile:

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Quick update:

AI Director

  • Blueprint that allows you to control the animal AI to perform certain actions to create a specific behavior that the Player can see, or a cut-scene
  • It supports ground, flying and swimming animals
  • It has 2 activation modes - Active or ‘Check Tag’
  • It can hide the animal until the AI Director is activated
  • Use it to create your own boss encounters!

@HeadClot - Check out the end of the video :slight_smile:

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Just sat down and had a chance to watch this video. I have been very busy recently. Love how this is turning out. This is going to be a day one buy for me.
Got a few questions though -

  1. Would it be possible to make the player a group manager or something? Why I am asking this. I am super excited about the recently released Dynasty Warriors 9 and Kingdom Come: Deliverance. In the Dynasty Warriors Series you have a handful of bodyguards that try to protect you during battle. Anyway - Would it be possible to get a handful of characters that protect and attack various targets in the world based on player input?

  2. Is this going to be multiplayer compatible?

  3. Any chance to get a tutorial post launch of this asset on using the plugin BP threads from the marketplace for more heavy multi threading stuff with your asset? BPThreads in Code Plugins - UE Marketplace

Keep up the awesome work. I am excited for this. :slight_smile:

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Hey HeadClot - thanks for the comments!

As far as your questions:

  1. This is an interesting idea - I can’t promise it will be there at release but I’ll add it to the list and look into it. It could be a modified version of my current taming system where you command 1 NPC. In this case, it would pass the command to various NPCs in your group. I have to think about this one :slight_smile:

  2. Yes! I plan to make it MP-compatible from the get-go :slight_smile:

  3. Hmm, this is another interesting idea. I don’t have the plug-in but this could be a solution to speed up the BOIDs calculations! And for the price its definitely worth checking it out. I’ll see what I can do about this one!

Btw, I’ve already added death from not getting food or water last night :slight_smile:

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will it easily added to multiplayer survival template that is sale at marketplace also?

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Hey @tero83,

I own the template and I’m planning to make a tutorial about integration once ABK is released. However, since I havent looked into it yet I cant promise it will be easy :).

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Devlog 4 - Better Fish and Follow Camera BP

  • Fish can be disabled when the Player is outside of the water and enabled only when the Player is in the water. This dramatically improves performance when the Player is near the water (within activation range), but the Player cannot see the fish (the water is not translucent).
  • Follow Camera BP - allows you to follow any animal in your level and rotate the camera or zoom in and out. This is useful to track and test behaviors. You can also change other settings like Global Time Dilation, Camera FOV, etc
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Hey guys,

A quick teaser for the upcoming devlog that’s all about Predators! :slight_smile:

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Looks awesome. so in this asset player can choose like third person character or play also with some animal

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Hey tero83,

Currently the ground animals are Blueprint Characters so you can easily possess them and play as them :). However the fish and birds are Blueprint Actors for performance reasons (Actors are much lighter than Characters so you can have many of them in your scene!). If there is demand I could make a pawn version of the birds / fish that you can possess, but I wouldn’t recommend using those in your game unless your game is about playing as animals :D.

Either way, it can easily be done if you want it!

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ok thanks for quick reply, i not know will it be game where play as animals or animal hunter, i first need to see this great asset in live. Hopefully before summer or during summer