Although, for performance reasons, I'll try to do it in reverse to human sense. Unreal Engine has good environment query system and I can leverage that. "Hush, you are in a church now" - a mother reminds again and again to a child who starts to become too active. How do we, humans, limit ourselves to some subset of activities to avoid doing something stupid "just because we can" or "I really wanted to do that at that very moment, even if that was highly inappropriate"? I guess, we do that based on our reaction and reminding about the environment we are in. Next, I was wondering, how an NPC would enter/exit the situations. Or am I totally wrong here and I shouldn't attempt to use Utility AI for cases when an NPC should be very predictable, almost following a well-known scenario? But I would like to avoid mixing multiple systems just to keep it less confusing. Or it could turn into a hybrid of utility AI (for high level actions, like "Where should I go next?") and behavior trees ("What sequence of predictable, adequate actions I should attempt to perform while being in this situation?"). I guess, this could also be visualized as a tree of utilities. Less actions to choose from = less parameters to tweak to prevent an NPC from doing something totally weird, right? Instead, I would want to make such action not available in that particular situation. I don't want an NPC to decide that it should start running home as soon as possible (because of some not so carefully tweaked parameters) while waiting for an order in a cafe. For example, if an NPC enters a cafe, there is no need to continue evaluating the entire list of utility actions for being on a street or at a workplace. It could also be considered just some kind of a context, but that word is so overused, that's why "situation" was my choice.īasically, a Situation is something like a filter that contains a predefined (at design time) set of parameters and actions that are available, adequate and make sense at the particular Situation. In essence, the idea is a new abstraction I call Situation. So, I hope somebody else has already thought about this and tried it out and can share the experience. These thoughts led me to some other questions and ideas that might be useful for optimization, but I'm not sure how they would work in practice.
#Ue4 ai actions full
But what about AI? How do I switch to narrower set of parameters and actions to choose from when NPC is offscreen? And does it really matter in practice? Should I leave the AI evaluating all the possible action scores and apply some checking only inside the action itself (if NPC is offscreen, then I do simple waiting for some sensible time instead of doing the full simulation)? Of course, I will turn off animations and meshes (with their collisions and physics) when an NPC gets offscreen.
#Ue4 ai actions code
Unreal Engine has Behavior Trees for AI but I find it somewhat limiting for my purposes, therefore I started looking into Utility AI.Ĭurrently I'm watching the GDC lecture videos about Utility AI and trying to figure out how do I go about implementing it in Unreal and to apply to my sandbox-like simulation.īy the way, are there any Utility AI code projects that could be plugged into UE4?Īs my town will have many citizens (hundreds? thousands? the more, the better, as long as my PC can handle) and I want to track them all on a world map (just dots), I would like to make it work efficiently. Also, there are different jobs that require some flexible behaviors for cases when I closely follow an NPC or interact with it.
But, depending on different factors, NPCs might choose to visit a shop or a cafe while on their way. I don't need that much micro-managing as in Sims.Īt first, I want to start with a bunch of simple NPCs that walk their route (using NavMesh, most probably) between work and home, based on time of day.
I'm playing around in Unreal Engine with intention to create some kind of a small town scale Sims-like simulation.
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