Curse That Magic Cat!

Patrolling is the basic behavior that the AI should always choose unless something more urgent happens, like searching or carrying. AI would patrol through each "Room" in the given order from the designers, trying to collect the spellbook in this area. "Room" is defined by volumes placed by the designers, each given a unique id. The connecting relations between rooms, which are commonly known as doors, are defined as an adjacency list, stored as data tables. AI would always take the shortest path generated by BFS when trying to move to another room.

In each "Room", AI would pick interest points randomly, and walk to that chosen interest point, before the randomized investigation time for this "Room" is up. Each interest point, placed by designers, also has a randomized waiting time for AI to investigate this point.

Searching happens when AI's attention gets high enough. Annoying behaviors, like things broken, cat meow, cat being seen, would increase AI's attention, attention would decrease gradually when AI is not very angry and no annoying behaviors happen. AI would try to search around the location where annoying behaviors happen, so that when the cat meows under a table, the AI would search the walkable place around the table. Even the cat is in another room, AI would still go to that room and search if it is in the search stage, opening the closed door if this new room is not visited yet.

The perception of these annoying behaviors is through Unreal's AI perception system, and all stimulus would be remembered in the given time period. When AI is in the search stage and needs to pick the most interesting point to search, all stimuli and memories would rank up, and the strongest and latest position would be chosen.

But it is quite possible that AI couldn't reach the exact interest point, like when the cat is under a shelf. We deal with this through two steps: pick a reachable point near this point, and generate a new interest point when AI has been stuck for some time.

AI would carry the cat to the nearest cage and lock the cat up. The nearest cage should reside in an open room, because the AI couldn't open a door while carrying the cat in both hands. The cat could struggle both on the way or in the cage. If the cat struggles and gets free on the way, AI would ignore cat for some time and turn to search stage. Otherwise, AI would continue to patrol through rooms.

Status before AI starts to carry cat is remembered, so that AI could pick up from where it was after recovering from carry stage.