Summary
Great work! We've now completed the first part of the AI project: constructing a terrain, generating a navigation mesh, and creating a basic waypoint system that an animated chick follows. We hit the ground running by importing 3D models for the terrain and NPC but also extended ourselves by writing a custom first-person controller instead of relying on the controller from the previous chapters.
This is an excellent beginning to simulating intelligence. However, as the project currently stands, there is no way for the chick to decide which action to take at any given moment; it is stuck patrolling in perpetuity. We'll fix this in the next chapter by constructing an FSM with distinct Patrol, Chase, and Attack states. We'll also look at how we can test to see whether the player is in the chick's line of sight using Raycasting. This check will act as a condition to transition between specific states, just as we used the Run parameter as a condition to switch...