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

Implementing a BT in Unity with Behavior Bricks

Behavior Bricks is a robust but free BT implementation for Unity developed by the Complutense University of Madrid in Spain. Using Behavior Bricks, you can start using BTs in your projects without implementing BTs from scratch. It also has a visual editor where you can drop and connect nodes without any additional code.

Follow these steps to install Behavior Bricks:

  1. We need to go to the Unity Asset Store by going on the website https://assetstore.unity.com/.
  2. Search for Behavior Bricks.
  3. Click on Add to My Assets. Once it's done, we can import it into our project.

Figure 9.3 – Behavior Bricks Asset Store main page

  1. Go to Package Manager (Window | Package Manager).
  2. Go to My Assets.

Figure 9.4 – The Package Manager window

  1. Import the Behavior Bricks package by clicking on the Import button.

Figure 9.5 –...