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

Building the chatbot server

Python is a great framework and it provides a number of great tools for game development. However, we are going to focus on using Unity for our purposes. Unity is an excellent and very user-friendly game engine that will make setting up complex examples in later chapters a breeze. Don't worry if you don't know C#, the language of Unity, since we will be manipulating the engine through Python in many cases. This means we want the ability to run our Python code outside Unity and we want to do it on a server.

If you are developing your game in Python, using a server then becomes optional, except that there are very compelling reasons to set up your AI bots as services or microservices. Microservices are self-contained succinct applications or services that only interface through some form of well-known communication protocol. AI Microservices...