Artificial Intelligence

UDK ’s artificial intelligence system provides two robust systems for AI navigation.  UDK supports the automatic creation and use of navigation meshes, giving AI-controlled characters increased spatial awareness of their environment and the ability to make smarter movement decisions.  
The UDK Navigation mesh implementation optimizes the performance and memory usage of AI in many scenarios relative to traditional node-based navigation systems, thanks to a more efficient representation and less reliance on collision-detection for movement.   UDK  also provides an up-to-date implementation of the robust and well-tested node-based navigation system used in Unreal Engine games over the last 12 years.

Navigation mesh system provides an accurate representation of an AI's traversable space via a connected graph of convex polygons:

• Memory footprint is reduced with the decrease in nodes being stored.
• Less nodes means less time fixing up cross-level pathing information.
• Pathfinding times go down as the density of the graph being searched shrinks.
• Better representation of the world results in better pathing behavior.
• Paths are automatically generated.
Furthermore, you can add crowds of animated characters to a map with UDK's flocking technology, which directs character movements and animations through a network of crowd destinations and Kismet interaction. UDK's crowd system gives you complete control over the movement and interaction of crowd agents with players and other NPCs using a "plug-in" behavior system.