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)

Summary

In this chapter, we learned how to implement a flocking behavior system. We implemented it using custom direction vectors to control the boids' movement that we calculated by applying Craig Reynolds' three main flocking concepts—alignment, coherence, and separation. We then applied our flocking behavior to the flying objects, but you can apply the techniques in these examples to implement other character behaviors, such as fish shoaling, insects swarming, or land animals herding. You'll only have to implement different leader movement behaviors, such as limiting movement along the y axis for characters that can't move up and down. For a 2D game, we would just freeze the y position. For 2D movement along uneven terrain, we would have to modify our script to not put any forces in the y direction.

We also took a look at crowd simulation and even...