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

Chapter 12: Putting It All Together

Over the previous eleven chapters, we've looked at various AI methods and built some simple demo applications using Unity3D. In this final chapter, we'll develop a more complex game example using some of the techniques we explored in previous chapters. The techniques we'll be using in this chapter include navigation meshes and finite-state machines (FSMs), but, more importantly, we will learn how to navigate and add AI to a pre-existing complex game. So, unlike the other chapters, this example is more like a real-world scenario.

In this chapter, we'll add AI to a simple tank combat game called TANKS! and contained in one of the official Unity tutorials, which, in turn, was inspired by an historic tank game called Combat for the Atari 2600. In the default version, TANKS! is a two-player game. Each player takes control of a tank, and the goal is to destroy each other. To make things more complicated, the player can decide the...