[WoLD Blog] 3 UDK: Spawn Bots and Adding Bot Functionality by Pete Bottomley

[AlexG]

Following articles were written and contributed by Pete Bottomley.
Pete is a co-founder of White Paper Games.

UDK: How to Spawn Bots in Kismet - Part 1/3



Spawning a Bot in Kismet will cover how to spawn a Bot and allow him to navigate around the level. He will also be able to detect where the player is and then shoot at him if he is in view.


In this basic Bot video you'll learn:

• Spawning a Bot in Kismet
• Set up the properties of the Bot
• Use traces and firing actions to detect and shoot the player
• Use move actions to navigate the level

Continue Reading...


UDK: How to Add Functinality to Bots - Part 2/3



Once we have our initial Bot set up we can add more functionality to him. We will keep replenishing his health if the player hits the Bot until the player picks up a rocket launcher and kills the Bot with a direct hit. We will also make it so that the Bot cannot pick up the rocket launcher and if he does, take it away from him and replace it with the default weapon.


In this added Bot functionality video you’ll learn:

• Check if the Bot is alive
• Get the Bot health
• Subtract the health property from the Bots overall health
• Heal the Bot in a looping sequence
• Take the Rocket Launcher away from the Bot if he tries to pick it up
• Add a Rocket Launcher to the scene.

Continue Reading...



UDK: Spawning Bots Final Touches - Part 3/3



In the final part to the AI setup we will do a bit of house-keeping to keep things organised and give the player some more direction about what to do in this situation.


In this AI video you'll learn:

• How to attach actions to events
• Display Bots name
• Change difficulty of Bot
• Use logs to display additional information

Continue Reading...

[DevinSherry]

Fantastic series Pete, I learned a lot about AI in here that I had no clue existed such as the Trace. It was also really cool to see your process of scripting events in Kismet and how they differ from mine. I enjoyed learning some cool shortcuts that I didn't know was there; it will definitely cut some time off of my work in Kismet.

Thanks for the tutorials!

[White Paper Games]

I'm glad someone as skilled as you Devin learnt something! I was aiming to tutorials at people just starting out in Kismet, but I also wanted to add enough depth in them so that people that knew Kismet could learn some different actions and events. Thanks for the feedback, really do appreciate it

[Avengus]

Just wanted to thank you for the excellent tutorial!

I've been using the default UTPawn and UDKPawn bots and have found that I am going to need something a little more custom for my level (unfortunately).

This was a great way to get started in learning how to set them up and have control over where they move and when they shoot at you!

[White Paper Games]

Hey Avengus,

Thanks!

It's pretty hard to get more functionality through AI without touching much code. On the UDK forums you'll find quite a few threads where people are messing around with custom AI's.

Hopefully this link will get you in the right direction:

http://forums.epicgames.com/threads/...Code-and-Stuff

He has some pretty interesting AI setups and if you pick them apart you can learn what each of them does.

[Split]

Thanks for the tutorial, has helped a lot

I was just wondering how you would expand this for multiple bots, if I was to want 6 bots spawning on 6 different path nodes, would I have to have 6 Objects, 6 Named Vars or is there an easier way to do this?