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)

Finding the best-promising path with A*

The A* algorithm is probably the most widely-used technique for path finding given its implementation simplicity, efficiency, and because it has room for optimization. It's no coincidence that there are several algorithms based on it. At the same time, A* shares several roots with Dijkstra's algorithm, so you'll find similarities in their implementations.

Getting ready

Just like Dijkstra's algorithm, this recipe uses the binary heap extracted from the GPWiki. Also, it is important to understand what delegates are and how they work. Finally, we are entering into the world of informed search; that means that we need to understand what a heuristic is and what it is for...