Behavior Tree work
Added 2020-06-10 03:25:05 +0000 UTCI started really digging into the AI this week and at first I was just going to do a quick pass, fix up some things, and call it good. But the more I started looking at things the more I realized it would be very difficult to scale and didn't easily support a lot of the things I have planned for the future. So I pulled the entire thing apart, made it modular, and more heavily reliant on the behavior tree instead of custom blueprints.
Almost all of the basic functionality is already back in place with some additions and improvements. Characters can now change between running and walking based upon how far away they are from their target, their behavior also changes based upon distance and if their target has a weapon readied, they have the ability to change between melee and ranged weapons, and they can respond to whether their target is attacking or blocking by either attacking, blocking, or dodging themselves. Next couple steps are re-implementing the grapple states and testing out some of the environmental query stuff.
One issue I have run into with ranged attacks is I'm not sure if there's a way to predict where the AI target is going to be? Currently they're always aiming directly at their target and any projectiles with travel time are pretty easy to dodge. Which isn't a huge issue but if anyone knows of an easy and efficient way in UE4 for the AI to predict their target's movement please let me know.
