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)

Adding automated navigation

The first step is to modify the level to support automated navigation. In the original game, all the moving objects (the tanks) are controlled by the user, so there is no need for pathfinding. Now that we want to add AI, we need to have a world representation through which the AI can move. Luckily, this process is very easy, thanks to NavMeshes.

Creating the NavMesh

To do this, implement the following:

  1. Open the Navigation windows (Window | AI | Navigation) and look at the NavMesh generation parameters.

In this case, NavMesh generation is quite easy: we are only interested in moving around on the ground surface plane, so there are no jumps, no links, and no slopes we need to care of.

  1. The only...