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

Using Off Mesh Links to connect gaps between areas

Sometimes, there may be some gaps in the scene that can make the NavMeshes disconnected. For instance, the Agents do not find a path in our previous examples if we do not tightly connect the slopes to the walls, so we need to make it possible to jump over such gaps. In another example, we may want to set up points where our agents can jump off the wall onto the plane below. Unity has a feature called Off Mesh Links to connect such gaps. Off Mesh Links can be set up manually or can be automatically generated by Unity's NavMesh generator.

Here's the scene that we're going to build in this example. As you can see in Figure 8.14, there's a small gap between the two planes.

Figure 8.14 – The scene with Off Mesh Links – NavMesh04-OffMeshLinks.scene

In this section, we will learn how to connect these two planes using Off Mesh Links.

Generated Off Mesh Links...