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)

Setting up the environment

As our tank uses a NavMeshAgent component to traverse the environment, we need to set up our scene using static game objects for the bake process to work properly, as we learned in Chapter 4, Finding Your Way. The maze is set up in a way so that towers are spread out fairly reasonably and the tank has plenty of space to maneuver around easily. The following screenshot shows the general layout of the maze:

The gauntlet our tank must run through

As you can see, there are seven towers spread out through the maze and a few twists and turns for our tank to break line of sight. In order to avoid having our tank graze the walls, we adjust the settings in the navigation window to our liking. By default, the example scene has the agent radius set to 1.46 and the step height to 1.6. There are no hard rules for how we arrived at these numbers; it is just trial...