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

Following a path

A path is a sequence of points in the game, connecting a point A to a point B. There are many ways to build a path. Usually, a path is generated by other game systems such as pathfinding (see Chapter 7, A* Pathfinding); however, in our demo, we construct the path by hand using waypoints. So first, we write a Path.cs script that takes a list of game objects as waypoints and create a path out of them.

Path script

Let's look at the path script responsible for managing the path for our objects. Consider the following code in the Path.cs file:

using UnityEngine;
public class Path : MonoBehaviour {
    public bool isDebug = true;
    public Transform[] waypoints;
    public float Length {
        get {
            return waypoints.Length;
        }
  ...