Setting up advanced AI

After doing a little more research into AI on the unreal engine I have found some new methods of achieving the kind of behavior I am looking for. I found this tutorial by the Unreal Engine's lead AI programmer, very useful.

Thanks to this tutorial, I have started using the perception function which is built into the AI controller itself. This is a component that contains values for vision distance and angle of vision cones which is perfect for my game. I only wish I had known about this sooner as it is much easier to set up than other methods I have seen. The debugging screen is also very detailed, displaying all the information I need.

Using this component I can loop through the actors in the detection range and check for the player using a cast. If the cast is successful I can set a bool to be checked in my behavior tree and select a response.

Environmental Query System

I will also be using the EQS system that I learned about in the video. This system is considered experimental on the engine but seems to work pretty well. The EQS finds a point in the area based on certain questions asked and records the vector for the AI to move to. The questions I asked basically lead to the closest location to the AI character which is not in the player's line of sight.

This is a good thing to have during my combat phase as the AI can take cover from the player. With the AI being a copy of the player blueprint as well, I should be able to call the cover system functions that I already have set up. I aim to hopefully have an AI opponent that can do all the same moves as the player by the end of this project.