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 the player's tank

Before writing the script for our player's tank, let's look at how we set up the PlayerTank game object. Our Tank object is a simple mesh with the Rigidbody and Box Collider components.

The Tank object is composed of two separate meshes, the Tank and Turret, with Turret being a child of Tank. This structure allows for the independent rotation of the Turret object using the mouse movement and, at the same time, automatically following the Tank body wherever it goes. Then, we create an empty game object for our SpawnPoint transform. We use it as a reference position point when shooting a bullet. Finally, we need to assign the Player tag to our Tank object. Now, let's take a look at the controller class:

Figure 2.1 – Our tank entity

The PlayerTankController class controls the player's tank. We use the W, A, S, and D keys to move and steer the tank and the left mouse button to aim and shoot from...