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)

Finite State Machines and You

In this chapter, we'll expand our knowledge of the FSM pattern and its uses in games and learn how to implement it in a simple Unity game. We will create a tank game with the sample code that comes with this book. We'll be dissecting the code and the components in this project. The topics we'll cover are as follows:

  • Understanding Unity's state machine features
  • Creating our own states and transitions
  • Creating a sample scene using examples

Unity 5 introduced state machine behaviors, which are a generic expansion of the Mecanim animation states that were introduced in the 4.x cycle. These new state machine behaviors, however, are independent of the animation system, and we will learn to leverage these new features to quickly implement a state-based AI system.

In our game, the player will be able to control a tank. The enemy tanks...