Highlights of AI Development This Week | Weekly Update #8

Overall this week we had a big focus on AI. Let’s have a look at some highlights.

1. AI Walkways
2. AI Weekly Schedule
3. AI’s Secondary Customisation System

AI Walkways

Not terribly much to update on this week. The highlight to show off this week is that I made a YouTube tutorial. It shows how you can make your AI easily stick to roads and other walkways in UE5.

You can check it out here.

AI Weekly Schedule

The other main thing this week was setting up weekly schedules for our Villagers. So basically, this is what they will get up to every day when not interacting with the player.

We already have a basic system for that in place and are now just filling out the content for all the different NPCs in the game.
Starting very broad (e.g., be at home, go to the workplace, go back home) and then getting more granular (e.g., when the day starts at home: brush teeth, grab breakfast, etc.) and all of that with some placeholder animations for now.

AI’s Secondary Customisation System

One of the systems I wrote a while ago, the secondary customization system, got an overhaul this week.

What this is responsible for is handling small customizations to AI characters based on external factors.
For example, when it’s outside and raining, they will get their umbrellas out. When it is sunny, they will wear sunglasses. The system also handles putting any customization away again when indoors or if they conflict in some way.
That’s the gist of it. I might do a longer post about it sometime to get into the technical details of it.

After streamlining the setup this week and investing many hours into retraining the AI on how to properly hold umbrellas, we have some progress to show 😉.

A completely new custom thing I added that comes just in time with the gloomy cold weather outside is a cool breath effect when it is cold enough in the game. Properly jazzed about that one ❄️😁.

And sometimes just happy little accidents happen when playing around with game systems. We clearly have the coolest cats in the game dev lands😄😎.

And with that, I will leave it here for this week. Have a lovely time out there, and I hope you have nicer weather than the gray gloom that has struck the UK for the last few days 🌈☀️.

Byyeee!