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 crowds

Crowd simulations are far less cut-and-dried. There really isn't any one way to implement them in a general sense. While not a strict definition, the term "crowd simulation" generally refers to simulating crowds of humanoid agents navigating an area while avoiding each other and the environment. Like flocks, the use of crowd simulations has been widely used in films. For example, the epic armies of Rohan, Gondor, and Mordor battling one another in The Lord of the Rings were completely procedurally generated using the crowd simulation software Massive, which was created for use in the film. While the use of crowd algorithms is not as widespread in video games as in films, certain genres rely on the concept more than others. Real-time strategy games often involve armies of characters moving in unison across the screen, and many sandbox games simulate...