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 the scene

We are going to set up a scene that looks like the following screenshot:

Figure 7.1 – Our sample test scene with obstacles

Let's follow a step-by-step procedure to do this:

  1. We create a directional light, the start and end game object, a few obstacle objects, a plane entity to be used as ground, and two empty game objects in which we put the GridManager and TestAStar scripts. After this step, our scene hierarchy should be like this:

Figure 7.2 – The demo scene hierarchy

  1. We create a bunch of cube entities and add them to the Obstacles layer. GridManager looks for objects with this tag when it creates the grid world representation:

Figure 7.3 – The Obstacle nodes seen in the Inspector

  1. We then create a cube entity and tag it as Start:

Figure 7.4 – The Start node seen in the Inspector

  1. Then, we create another cube entity...