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)

Testing the example

The example scene is ready to play right out of the box, so if you didn't get the itch to modify any of the default settings, you can just hit the play button and watch your tank go. You'll notice we've added a canvas with a label explaining the controls to the player. There is nothing fancy going on here; it's just a simple "press this button to do that" kind of instruction:

Simple instructions to guide the player

The example project is a great example to expand upon and to have fun with. With the concepts learned throughout this book, you can expand on the types of towers, the tank's abilities, the rules, or even give the tank more complex, nuanced behavior. For now, we can see that the concepts of state machines, navigation, perception and sensing, and steering, all come together in a simple yet amusing example. The following...