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)

Creating dynamic NavMeshes with obstacles

There are times when our levels have dynamic obstacles and we need the agent to avoid those obstacles as well. Let's imagine an MMORPG or a MOBA, where the minions from our hero also need to avoid obstacles in order to reach the target. We could implement a difficult algorithm to blend the navigation with the obstacle avoidance, or we could leverage the power of a dynamic NavMesh to get the same result, with little to no code disruption.

In this recipe, we will learn how to adapt a NavMesh to be dynamic and react to moving obstacles, so our agents can avoid them and reach the target successfully.

Getting ready

It is important to know how the NavMesh basics work, and how to build...