This week was getting in all the basics for enemy AI being the nav mesh, pawn sensing and simple AI move to for chasing the player.

I am mentioning the nav mesh as it did have to be configured slightly differently for my purposes as the level is procedurally generated the nav mesh had to be set to dynamically update so the nav mesh would update for the new rooms being generated.

These are the settings for the pawn sensing the only important things for my current implementation is the sight radius and that they can only sense players.

This is the pawn sensing which when it sees the player sets seeing player true then does a sequence of first calling follow player then has a delay of 0.6 seconds before setting seeing player false and calling reset seen. This 0.6 second delay is to give time before the player is stopped being seen the higher the number is the harder it is to shake the enemy as they are seeing the player longer therefore following them longer. This would be the opposite for a shorter delay as that means you have to be out of the seeing radius for an even shorter time before it stops being able to see you.

This is the follow player and reset seen functions which has a do once to ensure it only calls it once every time it initially sees the player then has the ai move to the players with an acceptance radius of 5 so still close to the player but not too close. This then has a short delay before checking if they are still seeing the player. If seeing the player is true it looks back in to the AI move to otherwise just prints can’t see player for now until I implement free roaming for the AI.

The reset seen function just resets the do once of the sequence.

This video shows how the enemy looks in game as can be seen in the video they are idle until you are in front of them as they only move when they see the player. Also as can be seen in the video it is quite difficult to get the enemy to stop being able to see you with the only plausible way being looping around them until you get enough beside them/behind them to stop them.