Welcome to Unity AI Programming Essentials. This book will guide you through all the skills necessary to put realistic game AI into your Unity games. We won't be spending much time discussing AI theory or how to implement popular AI algorithms from scratch. Instead, we will take the more efficient approach of using third-party Unity AI plugins to set up AI for your games easily. We will cover all the essential game AI skills, such as pathfinding to have your characters navigate a game scene, behavior trees to let them "think", and sensors so that they can react to their environment. We'll also cover more specialized tasks such as setting up crowds and cars for driving and integrating animation. By the end of the book, you should know all the basic skills you need to create game AI with Unity.
Chapter 1, Pathfinding, covers how to set up basic pathfinding so that game characters can navigate a game scene realistically.
Chapter 2, Patrolling, extends our pathfinding to have characters patrol routes in a scene.
Chapter 3, Behavior Trees, explains behavior trees and how they are used to give AI characters the ability to make decisions.
Chapter 4, Crowd Chaos, focuses on creating a wander behavior that can be used to create ambient crowds.
Chapter 5, Crowd Control, demonstrates using specialized crowd plugins how to generate groups of AI characters.
Chapter 6, Sensors and Activities, shows how to set up sensors and have AI characters change their activity based on what they sense in the environment.
Chapter 7, Adaptation, shows how to have AI characters react and adapt to different events in the game.
Chapter 8, Attacking, discusses different techniques to have an enemy AI attack the player.
Chapter 9, Driving, shows how to set up driving AI that uses a car's physics to generate realistic driving behavior.
Chapter 10, Animation and AI, discusses how to integrate character animation with AI using both Unity's legacy and Mecanim animation systems.
Chapter 11, Advanced NavMesh Generation, discusses more advanced options for setting up navigation meshes to handle mesh creation for different geometries and multiple NavMeshs in a scene.
This book uses Unity 4 with a standard license. Additionally, it uses RAIN, a Unity AI plugin that is available for free from http://rivaltheory.com/rain/. Additional plugins are used such as React AI and AI plugins for crowds and driving that can be purchased from the Asset Store, for which details are provided in the appropriate chapters.
This book is aimed at developers who know the basics of game development with Unity and want to learn how to add AI to their games. You do not need any previous AI knowledge; this book will explain all the essential AI concepts and show you how to add and use them in your games.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "We find all the NavigationTargetRig objects and store them in the coverPoints array."
A block of code is set as follows:
public override void Start(AI ai)
{
base.Start(ai);
ai.WorkingMemory.SetItem("donePatrolling", true);
}New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "In the AI game object/component that was added, from the Mind tab, set Behavior Tree Asset to RandomWalk."
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