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

Setting up the map

To get started, let's build a simple scene, as shown in the following screenshot. This is the first scene in the example project and is called NavMesh01-Simple.scene. You can use a plane as the ground object and several cube entities as the wall objects:

Figure 8.1 – An image of the NavMesh01-Simple scene, a plane with obstacles

In the following subsections, we will set up the walls as obstacles, bake the NavMesh, and configure the tanks.

Navigation static

Once we add the floor and the obstacles, it is essential to mark them with the Navigation Static tag so that the NavMesh generator knows that they need to be taken into account during the baking process. To do this, select all of the objects, click on the Static button, and choose Navigation Static, as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 8.2 – The Navigation Static property

Baking the NavMesh

Now that we have completed the scene...