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 awareness in a stealth game

Now that we know how to implement sensory-level algorithms, it's time to see how they can be taken into account in order to develop higher-level techniques for creating agent awareness.

This recipe is based on the work of Brook Miles and the team at Klei Entertainment for the game Mark of the Ninja. The mechanism revolves around the notion of having interest sources that can be seen or heard by the agents and a sensory manager to handle those.

Getting ready

As a lot of things revolve around the idea of interests, we'll need two data structures for defining the interests' sense and priority, and a data type for the interest itself.

This is the data structure for sense:

public...