Unreal Engine 5 NPC Behavior Tutorial Part 2: Creating Companion Followers with State Trees

[@D3kryption]

Part 2! Compaions :D What should we do next? Smart objects? Atttacking? Patrolling guards? Formations? Let me know below!

[@ryan-hayle]

Smart objects please. 🙂

[@Motivation4Everyday]

More, mooore information about it, please. Thx for your job!

[@Nangalad]

Great one! Im up for Formations as a next one =P

[@D3kryption]

I do love making formations! It can be so fun :D

[@Nangalad]

@@D3kryption I'm glad. I'm trying to do something like game on Steam called Kingmakers but on much less scale and just local coop or morelike singleplayer. Still the big battles is something which is missing in fantasy games on the market. Even such thing as NPC marches in Cities.

[@animator-alex]

Would love to see State-Trees being used for another purpose, User-Interfaces. For a long time Unreal Engine didn't have a good way to utilize Widgets in an easy to implement fashion. State-Tree's feel like they could be the replacement we're all hoping for. How would you implement a major player menu, lets say RPG for ease of understanding [Character, Party Setup, Skills, Inventory, Journal, Map, Settings] with a few simple panels/confirm boxes.

[@D3kryption]

Using state trees for a user interface? I think you could maybe tweak it to work that way but largey it re-runs itself over and over again so it might make it hard to balance the UI What are you trying to do? :)

[@animator-alex]

More thinking about how state trees can be more dynamically connected easily to benefit UI. Most of the time UI is very direct and hard to interconnect with other UI systems. State tree would bring in a lot of easier flow direction and easily allow a user to jump UI widgets at any interaction point, in a similar fashion with AI behavior

[@MasterKatSilver]

The guard 🗿

[@D3kryption]

He just doesn't want to mess with how epic the player is :D

[@halitbilici]

Using behavior trees is bettter than state trees? I want more complex stuff for my companion to achieve such as interacting placed actors in world

[@D3kryption]

From what I've seen, most people build their AI state driven. If this -> do this. If this -> do that. Behavior trees are far better when you want to combine things smoothly, blending etc... State driven behavior -> state trees work :D You can use either to make your companion interact with the world. If you were doing it state driven, have a check that checks for the interaction being in range, then make the NPC run over to it :)