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)

Randomness and Probability

In this chapter, we are going to look at how we can apply the concepts of probability and randomness to game AI. This chapter is more about generic game AI development techniques in the areas of randomness and probability, and less about Unity3D in particular. This means that we can apply the concepts of this chapter to any game development middleware or technology framework. We'll be using mono C# in Unity3D for the demos mainly using the console to output data, and won't address much on the specific features of the Unity3D engine and the editor itself.

Game developers use probability to add a little uncertainty to the behaviors of AI characters, as well as to the wider game world. Randomness makes the artificial intelligence system less predictable and provides a more exciting, challenging, and fair experience.

In this chapter, we will look...