Build your own AI drone: tune it live in a test range, save it as a ready Blueprint, drop it in your game. Enemies, allies, guards, bodyguards and swarms for Unreal Engine 5.8. Single-player.

Walk into the included Settings Lab, pick a starting drone, change its speed, look, eye, behaviour and weapon with the mouse and watch a big live 3D preview react. Step on the save pad: you get BP_YourName, BP_YourName_Swarm and BP_YourName_Trigger in one click. Drag one into your level, set the Team, press Play.

Documentation: Link - a PDF manual: Part 1 for game developers, Part 2 for programmers. The same PDF is inside the plugin (Docs folder).

WHAT YOU GET

• Settings Lab - the in-game drone configurator:

  • A walk-through test range with 32 bays in 15 zones (flight feel, physics, model and look, battery, health, effects and sound, instruments, the eye, targeting and teams, AI behaviour, weapons, lock-on and kamikaze, swarm, spawner and waves, performance)

  • Quick mode (only what matters) or Advanced mode (everything), all in plain words

  • A big live 3D preview of your drone and a live drone in every bay

  • A searchable asset picker for meshes, materials, Niagara effects and sounds - it searches your whole project, so you can try your own models right in the Lab

  • Panels and signs in English, German, French, Spanish and Russian

• One-click save: the save pad writes your drone as data assets and ready Blueprints - BP_YourName (the drone), BP_YourName_Swarm (a pack of them) and BP_YourName_Trigger (a trigger zone guarded by them) - with a step-by-step how-to

• 6 distinct drone models, ready to fly as Blueprints:

  • Basic - white consumer-style quad, the base for your own idea

  • Scout - olive, watches a wide area and reports, never fires

  • Guard - steel-grey armoured body, big searchlight, orange propellers

  • Hunter - black angular gunship with red propellers, rotary gun and side missiles

  • Kamikaze - yellow dart with black stripes and a red warhead; hovers, stares, then dives

  • Bodyguard - white and blue rounded shell with prop guard rings; follows and defends the player

  Every model is also included as a skeletal mesh, with LODs.

• Behaviour presets Sentry, Hunter, Kamikaze, Stalker, Bodyguard, Scout plus Custom, and Easy, Normal and Hard difficulty

• Patrol paths: drag BP_UD_PatrolPath into the level, add your drones and swarms to its lists, and draw the spline; for every point choose fly through or stop and wait, where to look while waiting, and the speed to the next point

• Trigger zones: when the player walks in, a swarm, a spawner's drones, drones you pick, every drone nearby or the zone's own guards go after them. When the player leaves, the drones search the zone, then return to their route. The zone can be made visible in game

• Swarms: one sees you, all know. Mixed weapons sort themselves into rings, and only a few drones fire at once so a fight stays readable

• Wave spawner: triggers (level start, volume, distance, signal, another spawner), 6 placement shapes, fly-in or drop-in entrances, waves with mixed squads, replace losses, events for every step

• 7 ready weapons: chaingun, burst rifle, railgun, scattergun, laser, rocket pod, mine dropper - four fire modes (Automatic, Burst, Single shot, Charged), hitscan, projectile, beam and dropped-charge delivery, ammo, heat, spread, recoil, tracer options and a laser core. Rockets can fly from the pod or drop and ignite, then turn in gradually toward the target (and fly straight on if it is lost); salvos and mine drops fire several at once. Choose your own mesh for rockets and mines

• The eye: a searchlight cone or laser beams that show what the drone sees, with colours that follow the alert level (calm, suspicious, alerted, engaging)

• Teams: Players, Enemies, Team C, Team D, Neutral. One rule set for every decision, no friendly fire, your own NPCs join in with a Drone Team component

• Health, damage and death: smoke, sparks, explosion, debris and a burning wreck. A drone that ends up upside down dies. Every effect is a slot you can replace

• Performance settings: far propellers keep spinning by default (a blurred disc, standing still or hidden are options), fewer flight updates at a distance, LODs and culling, with a crowd bay in the Lab to test them

• 30+ recorded sounds, 11 Niagara effects and sound attenuation and concurrency that keep a crowd of drones listenable

• 3 maps: an AI demo with 10 stations, the Settings Lab, and a base-drone tutorial for programmers

• Setup checks: Map Check lists mistakes (a combat drone on no team, a spawner with no drone class...) with a link to the actor

• Automation tests included with the source

MADE FOR
Shooters, action-adventure, sci-fi levels, stealth and security-patrol gameplay, tower defense, boss encounters, companions and escorts - and for teams where designers need to build and balance enemy drones without a programmer.

WHY C++
The drones are built from clean, component-based C++ that you can read and extend: override who a drone attacks, add a weapon, plug in Gameplay Ability System health, or replace the behaviour with a State Tree. Using the drones needs no code: everything is set in the Settings Lab, the Details panel and Blueprints. Full source included.