Book Image

Hands-On Deep Learning for Games

By : Micheal Lanham
Book Image

Hands-On Deep Learning for Games

By: Micheal Lanham

Overview of this book

The number of applications of deep learning and neural networks has multiplied in the last couple of years. Neural nets has enabled significant breakthroughs in everything from computer vision, voice generation, voice recognition and self-driving cars. Game development is also a key area where these techniques are being applied. This book will give an in depth view of the potential of deep learning and neural networks in game development. We will take a look at the foundations of multi-layer perceptron’s to using convolutional and recurrent networks. In applications from GANs that create music or textures to self-driving cars and chatbots. Then we introduce deep reinforcement learning through the multi-armed bandit problem and other OpenAI Gym environments. As we progress through the book we will gain insights about DRL techniques such as Motivated Reinforcement Learning with Curiosity and Curriculum Learning. We also take a closer look at deep reinforcement learning and in particular the Unity ML-Agents toolkit. By the end of the book, we will look at how to apply DRL and the ML-Agents toolkit to enhance, test and automate your games or simulations. Finally, we will cover your possible next steps and possible areas for future learning.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: The Basics
6
Section 2: Deep Reinforcement Learning
14
Section 3: Building Games

A GAN for creating music

In our final grand example of this chapter, we are going to look at generating music with GANs for games. Music generation is not especially difficult, but it does allow us to see a whole variation of a GAN that uses LSTM layers to identify sequences and patterns in music. Then it attempts to build that music back from random noise to a passable sequence of notes and melodies. This sample becomes ethereal when you listen to those generated notes and realize the tune originates from a computer brain.

The origins of this sample are pulled from GitHub, https://github.com/megis7/musegen, and developed by Michalis Megisoglou. The reason we look at these code examples is so that we can see the best of what others have produced and learn from those. In some cases, these samples are close to the original, and others not so much. We did have to tweak a few things...