Book Image

Unity Artificial Intelligence Programming - Fifth Edition

By : Dr. Davide Aversa
Book Image

Unity Artificial Intelligence Programming - Fifth Edition

By: Dr. Davide Aversa

Overview of this book

Developing artificial intelligence (AI) for game characters in Unity has never been easier. Unity provides game and app developers with a variety of tools to implement AI, from basic techniques to cutting-edge machine learning-powered agents. Leveraging these tools via Unity's API or built-in features allows limitless possibilities when it comes to creating game worlds and characters. The updated fifth edition of Unity Artificial Intelligence Programming starts by breaking down AI into simple concepts. Using a variety of examples, the book then takes those concepts and walks you through actual implementations designed to highlight key concepts and features related to game AI in Unity. As you progress, you’ll learn how to implement a finite state machine (FSM) to determine how your AI behaves, apply probability and randomness to make games less predictable, and implement a basic sensory system. Later, you’ll understand how to set up a game map with a navigation mesh, incorporate movement through techniques such as A* pathfinding, and provide characters with decision-making abilities using behavior trees. By the end of this Unity book, you’ll have the skills you need to bring together all the concepts and practical lessons you’ve learned to build an impressive vehicle battle game.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Part 1:Basic AI
6
Part 2:Movement and Navigation
11
Part 3:Advanced AI

Chapter 8: Navigation Mesh

As we saw in Chapter 7, A* Pathfinding, the most critical decision in pathfinding is how to represent the scene's geometry. The AI agents need to know where the obstacles are, and it is our job as AI designers to provide the best representation we can to the pathfinding algorithm. Previously, we created a custom representation by dividing the map into a 2D grid, and then we implemented a custom pathfinding algorithm by implementing A* using that representation. But wouldn't it be awesome if Unity could do all that for us?

Fortunately, Unity can do this using Navigation Meshes (NavMeshes). While in the previous 2D representation, we divided the world into perfect squares, with NavMeshes, we will divide the world using arbitrary convex polygons. This representation has two exciting advantages: first, every polygon can be different, and therefore we can use a small number of big polygons for vast open areas and many smaller polygons for very crowded...