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

Agent and the Environment

Playing with and exploring experimental reinforcement learning environments is all well and good, but, at the end of the day, most game developers want to develop their own learning environment. To do that, we need to understand a lot more about training deep reinforcement learning environments, and, in particular, how an agent receives and processes input. Therefore, in this chapter, we will take a very close look at training one of the more difficult sample environments in Unity. This will help us understand many of the intricate details of how important input and state is to training an agent, and the many features in the Unity ML-Agents toolkit that make it easy for us to explore multiple options. This will be a critical chapter for anyone wanting to build their own environments and use the ML-Agents in their game. So, if you need to work through...