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

Using an FSM framework

The FSM framework we're going to use here is adapted from the Deterministic Finite State Machine framework, based on Chapter 3.1 of Game Programming Gems 1 by Eric Dybsend. We'll only be looking at the differences between this FSM and the one we made earlier. For this reason, it is important that you follow the example code found in the Chapter02 folder of the book repository (https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Unity-Artificial-Intelligence-Programming-Fifth-Edition). In particular, we will look at the AdvancedFSM scene.

In this section, we will study how the framework works and how we can use this to implement our tank AI. AdvancedFSM and FSMState are the two main classes of our framework. So, let's take a look at them first.

The AdvancedFSM class

The AdvancedFSM class manages all the FSMState classes we've implemented and keeps them updated with the transitions and the current state. So, the first thing to do before using our framework...