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

Running the chatbot in Unity

Unity is quickly becoming the standard game engine for learning to develop games, virtual reality, and augmented reality applications. Now it is quickly becoming the standard platform for developing AI and ML applications as well, partly due to the excellent reinforcement learning platform the team at Unity has built. This Unity ML platform is a key component in our desire to use the tool, since it currently is at the cutting edge of advanced AI for games.

The AI team at Unity, led by Dr. Danny Lange and their senior developer Dr. Arthur Juliani, have made numerous suggestions and contributions to ideas for content in this book, both directly and indirectly. This, of course, has had a huge impact on using Unity for major portions of this book.

Installing Unity is quite straightforward, but we want to make sure we get the installation just right the...