Book Image

Unity Artificial Intelligence Programming - Fourth Edition

By : Dr. Davide Aversa, Aung Sithu Kyaw, Clifford Peters
Book Image

Unity Artificial Intelligence Programming - Fourth Edition

By: Dr. Davide Aversa, Aung Sithu Kyaw, Clifford Peters

Overview of this book

Developing Artificial Intelligence (AI) for game characters in Unity 2018 has never been easier. Unity provides game and app developers with a variety of tools to implement AI, from the basic techniques to cutting-edge machine learning-powered agents. 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 fourth edition with Unity will help you break down AI 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. Further on, you'll learn how 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'll then learn how to implement simple ?ocks and crowd dynamics, which are key AI concepts in Unity. Moving on, you'll learn how to implement a behavior tree through a game-focused example. Lastly, you'll apply all the concepts in the book to build a popular game.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Machine Learning in Unity

Machine learning is the hottest buzzword in artificial intelligence (AI). Nowadays, everything contains (or claims to contain) some machine learning-powered AI that is supposed to improve our life: calendars, to-do apps, photo management software, every smartphone, and much more. Even if most of the times, the use of the phrase "machine learning" is just a marketing gimmick, it is indisputable that machine learning has improved significantly in recent years and, most importantly, there are tools that allow everybody to implement a learning algorithm without any previous AI knowledge.

So what about video games? We sure want to avoid missing the machine-learning train, don't we? Fortunately, Unity provides a complete toolkit for machine learning that spares us the complication of interfacing the game engine with an external machine-learning...