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

Setting up our scene

Let's get started by setting up our scene:

  1. First, we add a plane as a floor.
  2. Let's create a few walls to block the line of sight from our AI character to the enemy. We make these out of short—but wide—cubes that we group under an empty GameObject called Obstacles.
  3. Finally, we add a directional light to see what is going on in our scene.

We represent the player with a tank, similar to what we used earlier, and we represent the NPCs with simple cubes. We also have a Target object to show us where the tank is moving in our scene. Our Scene hierarchy should look similar to the following screenshot:

Figure 4.1 – The setup of the example's Hierarchy

Now, let's position the tank, AI character, and walls randomly in our scene. First, make sure to increase the size of the plane to something that looks good. Fortunately, in this demo, all the objects are locked on the plane, and there...