Artificial Intelligence

How AI works in nanos world

Every Character or CharacterSimple spawned without a Player possessing it will automatically be possessed by an AI Controller. Which means you can use Character methods such as :MoveTo() and :LookAt().

In nanos world, AI as well as Physics are things distributed through Clients to be calculated and shared with the other Players (please refer to Network Authority), which means the AI will only work if there is a Player connected to the server.

info

If you call :MoveTo() on a NPC and there is no Player connected, it will only start walking once a Player joins the server.

Moving NPCs

The main AI methods are available in all Pawns (Character and CharacterSimple):

• :MoveTo() makes the NPC walk to a location.
• :Follow() makes the NPC keep following another Actor.
• :StopMovement() stops the current movement.
• :SetAIAvoidanceSettings() makes NPCs avoid each other while walking.

When a movement finishes (or fails, e.g. if there is no path), the event MoveComplete is triggered:

Server/Index.lua

-- Spawns a NPC (a Character not possessed by any Player)
local npc = Character(Vector(0, 0, 100), Rotator(), "nanos-world::SK_Male")

-- Makes it walk to a location, considering arrived when it's at 50 units from it
npc:MoveTo(Vector(1000, 0, 100), 50)

npc:Subscribe("MoveComplete", function(self, succeeded)
    if (succeeded) then
        Console.Log("The NPC arrived!")
    else
        Console.Log("The NPC couldn't find a path!")
    end
end)

To find points where NPCs can walk to, the client side Navigation Static Class provides methods such as Navigation.GetRandomReachablePointInRadius() and Navigation.FindPathToLocation().

Navigation Mesh

In order to NPCs to figure out the path to walk, the map will need to have a NavMesh configured.