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)

Setting up the scene

In order to get started with implementing the sensing system, you can jump right into the example provided for this chapter, or set up the scene yourself, by following these steps:

  1. Let's create a few barriers to block the line of sight from our AI character to the tank. These will be short but wide cubes grouped under an empty game object called Obstacles.
  2. Add a plane to be used as a floor.
  3. Then, we add a directional light so that we can see what is going on in our scene.

As you can see in the example, there is a target 3D model, which we use for our player, and we represent our AI agent using a simple cube. We will also have a Target object to show us where the tank will move to in our scene.

For simplicity, our example provides a point light as a child of the Target so that we can easily see our target destination in the game view. Our scene hierarchy...