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 simple goblin name generator

In the previous section, we explained that the primary purpose of PCG is to provide variety while removing from the developer the burden of scripting such variety by hand. So, imagine that we are developing an old-school RPG, and we want the players to be able to interact with the NPC characters of a goblin encampment.

In the encampment, there are hundreds of goblins, and we really want to avoid coming up with the name and the occupation of every one of them. Not only because it's boring and time-consuming, but if we're going to have random encounters with goblins in the game world, we need to have the ability to create new goblins on the fly.

Fortunately, we have a more fun (for us) solution: to write an algorithm generating a huge number of random goblin characters.

Generating goblin names

In order to generate something, we need to find some kind of generative rule. To find such a rule, the best thing is to look at...