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)

Following a path

Before diving into A*, which is a procedural approach to pathfinding, we'll implement a more rudimentary waypoint-based system. While more advanced techniques, such as the aforementioned A* method or Unity's NavMesh, will often be the preferred method for pathfinding, looking at a simpler, more pure version will help set the foundation for understanding more complex pathfinding approaches. Not only that, but there are many scenarios in which a waypoint-based system will be more than enough, and will allow more fine-tuned control over your AI agent's behavior.

In this example, we'll create a path, which is made up of individual waypoints. For our purposes, a waypoint is simply a point in space with an X, Y, and Z value; we can simply use a Vector3 to represent this data. By making a serialized array of Vector3 in our script, we'll be able...