Book Image

Unity 2017 Game AI Programming - Third Edition - Third Edition

Book Image

Unity 2017 Game AI Programming - Third Edition - Third Edition

Overview of this book

Unity 2017 provides game and app developers with a variety of tools to implement Artificial Intelligence. Leveraging these tools via Unity's API or built-in features allows limitless possibilities when it comes to creating your game's worlds and characters. This third edition with Unity will help you break down Artificial Intelligence into simple concepts to give you a fundamental understanding of the topic to build upon. 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 5. Further on you will learn to distinguish the state machine pattern and implement one of your own. This is followed by learning how to implement a basic sensory system for your AI agent and coupling it with a Finite State Machine (FSM). Next you'll learn how to use Unity's built-in NavMesh feature and implement your own A* pathfinding system. You will then learn how to implement simple flocks and crowd's dynamics, key AI concepts. Moving on, you will learn how to implement a behavior tree through a game-focused example. Lastly, you'll combine fuzzy logic concepts with state machines and apply all the concepts in the book to build a simple tank game.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

Using AI in Unity

In this section, we'll walk you through some of the AI techniques being used in different types of games. We'll learn how to implement each of these features in Unity in the upcoming chapters. Unity is a flexible engine that provides a number of approaches to implement AI patterns. Some are ready to go out of the box, so to speak, while others we'll have to build from scratch. In this book, we'll focus on implementing the most essential AI patterns within Unity so that you can get your game's AI entities up and running quickly. Learning and implementing the techniques within this book will serve as a fundamental first step in the vast world of AI. Many of the concepts we will cover in this book, such as pathfinding and Navigation Meshes, are interconnected and build on top of one another. For this reason, it's important to get the fundamentals right first before digging into the high-level APIs that Unity provides.