There should be some player type AI templates

General Feedback & Requests
1

Hi,

I don’t know if it’s already inside UE4 or not.

UE4 should have player type templates like enemies, friendlies, civilians etc. Also in ue4, pawns doesn’t act like human they acts more like computer controlled robots. So I think there should be some ready templates for different player AIs which act like human in real world. From there we can start and modify them as our need.

Please let me know how you guis like my idea or not. I think this is really a nice idea.

Thanks

2

It’s a nice idea, but it’s doesn’t quite fit the engine side since it’s not generic enough. However we should figure out a way to supply this kind of “game framework” features to users wanting to use them. Let me write it down and make it happen at some point :wink:

3

Thanks for the reply and looking at my post. I didn’t thought that I will get reply from engine developer.

You are right that it doesn’t fit the engine side. But in many cases, we need this feature. Even it will work if we get as you said. If we get templates like these kind of game framework, then It will help us a lot. Making everything from the scratch is really a long process.

4

This is really missing here. Coming here from Cryengine its something that I miss a lot, being able to just drop in some friendly and or enemy AI without them acting like arena bots. Not everybody wants a multiplayer deathmatch or CTF type game. Some AI Character templates would really be great.

5

Absolutely right :smiley:

I actually get this idea from using cryengine. We have so many features in UE4 that makes it better than cryengine in workflows. I don’t know others but my opinion is UE4 is the best. :cool:

So my request to epic that we need these features in UE4 please.

6

I hear you guys and I think it’s doable, at least in my spare time :wink:

However, I’m not a designer :smiley: How would you imagine such templates behave out of the box? What would you imagine as a minimal required setup for these templates to work?

7

We don’t need any design things. We just need some basic setup of some AI which can act like friendly, enemy or civilian by default which one we select.

Also by act like human I didn’t mean not out of the box. We need basic behaviors for example they have eye sight distance, they care about collision, they can protect themselves.

8

What I meant was what behavior do you expect from a civilian and what behavior from an enemy. This is game-design-specific thing and we’d need to come up with a generic enough behavior for it to be useful by a wide enough group of devs.

9

Since AI needs tend to be very bespoke for each game I wonder if it would be better to provide tutorials that each focus on a particular type of behaviour and then let people combine them in their own ways.

Tutorials could include:

  • Creating an alligence system so AI reacts different to different alligencies (friendly / hostile / neutral)
  • Following a custom patrol route placed in the Editor
  • Reacting to seeing another character
  • Reacting to another character’s behaviour
  • Chasing / following another character
  • Running away from another character
  • Reacting to other actors (grenade that has been thrown, door that is open / closed)
  • Playing custom animations at nodes in the world (AI randomly looking / inspecting things)
  • Creating convesation system so that the player can interrupt an AI’s current behaviour, the AI will stand on the spot until the conversation has finished and then resume their current behaviour
  • AI jumping up / down between different heights / nav meshes
  • Flying AI

I woud also love to see some even more basic tutorials than that which go over the core components of UE4’s AI system and how they all relate to each other.

10

Oh, sorry I misunderstand. So here what I want.

civilian:

  1. They will just walk around freely or to the paths we define (I’m not sure if the pathnodes are still available in ue4 as I didn’t look for it yet).

  2. If they take hit, they will run away and try to save themselves.

Friendly:

  1. They will just walk around freely or to the paths we define (I’m not sure if the pathnodes are still available in ue4 as I didn’t look for it yet).

  2. They will have sight area. If they see enemies they will attack.

  3. Once they catch a target, they start chasing it but target should be able to escape.

  4. Player can’t attack on them.

Enemies:

  1. They will just walk around freely or to the paths we define (I’m not sure if the pathnodes are still available in ue4 as I didn’t look for it yet).

  2. They will have a sight area. If player walks into their sight, they will attack the player.

  3. They will treat friendlies and civilians like player. (Attack them)

  4. Once they catch a target, they start chasing it but target should be able to escape.

For all the AI:

  1. should care about collision while walking and attacking.

  2. For eyesight, I mean they can’t detect if target is behind them. (Which was in ue3)

Hope these explains perfectly. :slight_smile:

Sohan

11

Jimmy_Jazz is right too.

We need some tutorials on different AI systems with UE4. So that we can combine and make what we really want. Also some basic templates would be nice to get.

12

Go it. Taking notes :smiley:
BTW, I’ve started an online Unreal AI tutorial site so there’s already a place these things could live :smiley: You can find it here.

13

I’d have to put my vote in for this as well. There’s so much variation in what everyone is going to need, like in my case navigation is my biggest issue. If a number of templates were made based on the suggestions in the thread, I’d still be at a loss being all built on the same navigation system. Course I wouldn’t say templates were a bad thing, whatever extras that can be provided are always good. Just that more documentation is sure to benefit a wider audience, and provides some level of comfort that proper setup is being done versus inefficient results through trial and error.

Would love to see something on detourcrowds…sooner than later if at all possible.

Thanks!!!

14

I’ll be doing some AI tutorials for UE4 over the next month or so. So hopefully we’ll get some more stuff going AI wise. Mieszko is probably a lot busier than I am and I’ve got to do some tutorials for my classes anyway. So I’ll try and cover some of the things in Jimmy’s list.

15

This one’s actually really easy (in short: just make your AI use UCrowdFollowingComponent a its path following component) so I might just cover that next in my AI tutorial series.

Thanks a lot, Phil! Any tutorials helping people wrap their heads around AI in UE4 (and AI in general!) are much appreciated :smiley:

16

I’m purely coming at this from a BP angle but if you’ve got anything tutorial related you’d like looked at before releasing it then I’m happy to give it a spin :slight_smile:

17

That’s…that’s it? Maybe I’m overthinking much on this. Been looking at the API thinking I’d need to create a DetourCrowd to manage adding/removing agents, path corridors, etc. I admit to being still quite a noob as far as AIController goes in general…but I think much of that is confusion about how playercontroller vs aicontroller relates to actors and reading too many opinions over it on the forums for some months now. Might need to mentally erase what I think I know and start over…

So, would I be on the right “path” to say that setting the path following component to UCrowdFollowingComponent, then setting crowd parameters in the AAIController is all that needs be done? And as a bonus question just to make sure I’m not barking up the wrong tree, reading the API on detourcrowds leads me to believe this can be used for flocking movements, or have I totally misread what these functions do? (If misread, I’ll just be on my way then :slight_smile: )

Thanks!!!

18

Some AI I personally would really love to see is some (hopefully newtonian) spaceship AI. One of my eventual goals (obviously a few years out from now) is to make a space sim, but alas, I am not a programmer of any kind, thus AI eludes me even in conceptual form. T_T

19

I’d like to see a modular system, with behavior modules that could be added or enabled/disabled.
Also implementing a reaction chart that would be like a spreadsheet that determines what the characters reaction or disposition is to various other AI entities. This could be very simple or grow to be very complex depending on how big you make the array.

Whatever form it takes, the most important part for me is that it is easy to understand, easy to expand(or simplify), and easy to implement.

20

That’s what I wanted. Some AI template can act like modular system. Just like the sky sphere, or default material editor which already has modularity. In my opinion, material editor is so much improved. We want some modularity for AI too which is the most important part of any game.