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

Adding automated navigation

The first step is to modify the level to support automated navigation. In the original game, the players control all the moving objects (the tanks), so pathfinding is unnecessary. Now that we want to add AI, we need to have a world representation through which the AI can move. Luckily, this process is straightforward, thanks to NavMeshes.

Creating the NavMesh

To do this, perform the following steps:

  1. Open the Navigation window (Window | AI | Navigation) and look at the NavMesh generation parameters. In this case, NavMesh generation is relatively easy: we are only interested in moving around on the ground surface plane, so there are no jumps, no links, and no slopes we need to care of.
  2. The only adjustment to the default NavMesh parameters we need to make is for the baking agent size (that is, the measures of the virtual agent used by Unity to verify whether a location is large enough to allow the Agent to pass).
  3. The tanks used in the...