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

Installing the ML-Agents Toolkit

As a first step, we need to download the toolkit. We can do this by cloning the repository with the following command:

git clone --branch release_19 https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/ml-agents.git

This command creates an ml-agents folder in your current folder. The ML-Agents Toolkit is composed of two main components:

  • A Python package containing the Python interface for Unity and PyTorch's trainers (stored in the ml-agents folder)
  • A Python package containing the interface with OpenAI Gym (https://gym.openai.com/), a toolkit for training reinforcement learning agents (stored in the gym-unity folder).

    Information

    Git is the most famous version-control application in the world. It is used to store your source code, keep track of different versions, collaborate with other people, and much more. If you are not already using Git, you should really check it out. You can download it from https://git-scm.com/.

Now, it is time...