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 the resulting crisp data

The data output from a fuzzy controller can then be plugged into a behavior tree or a finite state machine. Of course, we can also combine multiple controllers' output to make decisions. In fact, we can take a whole bunch of them to achieve the most realistic or interesting result (as realistic as a magic-using wizard can be, anyway).

The following figure illustrates a potential set of fuzzy logic controllers it can be used to determine whether or not to cast the heal spell:

We've looked at the health question already, but what about the rest? We have another set of questions that really don't mean much to our agent on their own:

Do you have enough mana? Well, you can have a little bit of mana, some mana, or a lot of mana. It would not be uncommon for a human player to ask this question as they choose to cast a magic spell in a game...