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)

HomeRock card game example

To further illustrate potential uses for BTs, let's take a look at the second example for this chapter included in the sample code. In the CardGame Unity scene, you'll find an implementation of a turn-based card game, where the player and the AI opponent have three different abilities: attack, heal, and defend. The user gets to pick which ability to use on their turn, and the AI will use a BT to decide which course of action to take. The game ends when a player reaches 0 hit points. The following image illustrates our game view:


Game screen for HomeRock—Heroes of Unity

As you can see here, the player can select their attack by clicking on one of the cards, which have been spruced up with some flavor text. The player's hit points are displayed in the lower-left corner, and the AI enemy's hit points are displayed in the top...