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 4: Implementing Sensors

As we discussed in the previous chapter, a character AI system needs to be aware of its surrounding environment. For example, Non-Player Characters (NPCs) need to know where the obstacles are, the direction the player is looking, whether they are in the player's sight, and a lot more. The quality of the AI of our NPCs depends, for the most part, on the information they can get from the environment. Sensor mistakes are apparent to the player: we've all experienced playing a video game and laughing at an NPC that clearly should have seen us, or, on the other hand, been frustrated because an NPC spotted us from behind a wall.

Video game characters usually get the input information required by their underlying AI decision-making algorithms from sensory information. For simplicity, in this chapter, we will consider sensory information as any kind of data coming from the game world. If there's not enough information, characters might show...