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

Summary

In this chapter, we applied some of the AI techniques that we learned previously to our simple tanks combat game. Then, of course, we'd be able to use some more techniques in a larger game scope. Still, in this short chapter, we reused the simple FSM framework that we built in Chapter 2, Finite State Machines, as well as Unity's built-in navigation meshes capabilities.

This example project is a perfect starting point for exploring the AI techniques introduced in this book. You can implement many more improvements to the AI of this demo, and I encourage you to play with it a bit more. There are several pieces of low-hanging fruit, so here are my suggestions:

As a first exercise, you can increase the number of states, for instance, by adding a Chasing state in which the tank will actively look for the player. This structure is like the Attack state, but with a bigger radius. Then, as a more significant step, try to replace the FSM with a Behavior tree. The Behavior...