Unreal Game Engine Technology

Artificial Intelligence

Give AI-controlled characters increased spatial awareness of the world around them and enable them to make smarter movements with Unreal Engine 3’s gameplay framework and artificial intelligence system. Add life to your game world by using Unreal Engine 3’s crowd system with flocking technology, which can simulate hundreds of characters within a scene in real time.

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Unreal AI

Unreal Engine 3 ’s artificial intelligence system provides robust systems for game AI and navigation. Unreal Engine 3 supports the automatic creation and use of navigation meshes, giving AI-controlled characters increased spatial awareness of their environment and the ability to make smarter movement decisions.

The Unreal Engine 3 Navigation mesh implementation optimizes the performance and memory usage of game AI in many scenarios relative to traditional node-based navigation systems.

Navigation mesh system provides an accurate representation of an AI’s traversable space via a connected graph of convex polygons:

• Memory footprint is reduced with the decrease in nodes being stored
• Less nodes means less time fixing up cross-level pathing information
• Pathfinding times go down as the density of the graph being searched shrinks
• Better representation of the world results in better pathing behavior
• Paths are automatically generated

Furthermore, you can add crowds of animated characters to a map with Unreal Engine 3’s flocking technology, which directs character movements and game animation through a network of crowd destinations and Kismet interaction. Unreal Engine 3’s crowd system gives you complete control over the movement and interaction of crowd agents with players and other NPCs using a “plug-in” behavior system.

Raw Data

• Crowds
• AI Visibility manager
  • Easily manage AI Visibility with a minimal (and configurable) amount of line checks per frame
• AI Commands
  • Atomic state objects which execute on a stack for easily composible game AI task flow
  • Make lots of small atomic actions, and reuse them everywhere!
• Navigation Mesh:
  • PathObstacles: add obstacles, modifications at runtime fully dynamic
  • PathObjects: link complex game objects to the mesh statically for 0 runtime cost, but still allow for flexible game based modification of the mesh’s state
  • Path Constraints: Composible path search objects allow for easily customizable and tunable path generation
  • Fully automated construction process
  • Obstacle mesh for fast “can I go here” checks
  • PHYS_NavMeshWalking: Fast walking physics using the navmesh alone