Book Image

Unity 2018 Artificial Intelligence Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Jorge Palacios
Book Image

Unity 2018 Artificial Intelligence Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Jorge Palacios

Overview of this book

Interactive and engaging games come with intelligent enemies, and this intellectual behavior is combined with a variety of techniques collectively referred to as Artificial Intelligence. Exploring Unity's API, or its built-in features, allows limitless possibilities when it comes to creating your game's worlds and characters. This cookbook covers both essential and niche techniques to help you take your AI programming to the next level. To start with, you’ll quickly run through the essential building blocks of working with an agent, programming movement, and navigation in a game environment, followed by improving your agent's decision-making and coordination mechanisms – all through hands-on examples using easily customizable techniques. You’ll then discover how to emulate the vision and hearing capabilities of your agent for natural and humanlike AI behavior, and later improve the agents with the help of graphs. This book also covers the new navigational mesh with improved AI and pathfinding tools introduced in the Unity 2018 update. You’ll empower your AI with decision-making functions by programming simple board games, such as tic-tac-toe and checkers, and orchestrate agent coordination to get your AIs working together as one. By the end of this book, you’ll have gained expertise in AI programming and developed creative and interactive games.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Building an air-hockey rival

Air-hockey is probably one of the most popular games enjoyed by players of all ages during the golden age of arcades, and it is still played everywhere. With the advent of touchscreen mobile devices, developing an air-hockey game is a fun way to not only test physics engines, but to also develop intelligent rivals despite the apparent low complexity of the game.

Getting ready

This is a technique based on top of some of the algorithms that we learned in Chapter 1, Behaviors – Intelligent Movement, such as Seek, Arrive, and Leave, and the Raycasting knowledge that is employed in several other recipes, such as path smoothing.

It is necessary for the paddle game object to be used by the agent...