Unreal Engine 4 has a character AI implemented out of the box. And I have already posted about simple behavior trees. But what about non-characters? Well, this is unknown territory. But good thing Epics left some hooks which you can use to turn things alive. This is a tutorial on how to implement a simple vehicle AI in UE4.
I’ll try to make things as simple as possible, so let’s use the basic assets. We’ll use Advanced Vehicle C++ template as a starting point.
You may have heard about the famous 12 principles of animation. Two Disney animators formulated and introduced them in 1981. These principles are really important if you care about how the animation looks in your movie or game.
In Amazin Escape, the game I am working on now, the main protagonist is a jumping lamp. It jumps all the time and certainly different kinds of animations are an essential part of the game. When I worked on them I tried to follow the principles thoroughly.
The game I currently am working on is quite heavy on all kinds of jumps, so I dedicated some time to investigate how to configure UE4 character jumps properly. Some random values I put in Jumping / Falling section of Character Movement component did not work well for me:
I drew a trajectory of my jumps before I started tweaking the config values. You may notice that they are not symmetrical – the reason for that is the character (a lamp in my case) speeding up horizontally during a jump. This does not make sense for projectile motion.
Do you use Set Input Mode Game Only node in your game? Have you experienced any strange behavior of a user input controller? If yes, stick with me, I am going to shed some light on how this function works under the hood.
Unreal Engine 4 has three input modes:
In some games or game genres, a typical 3d perspective camera projection does not really work. For example, classic 2d platformers (2d by definition does not have a perspective) or top-down shooters. And since UE4 is a 3D engine in the first place, one gets a question: how to implement an orthographic camera in UE4?
Fortunately, Unreal Engine has an option for such camera mode. You can enable it in Camera Settings for a Camera Actor:
