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 in games

Game designers and developers use randomness in game AI to make the game and characters more realistic and varied by not making the same decision or taking the same action again and again.

Let's take an example of a typical soccer game. One of the rules of a soccer game is to award a direct free kick if one player commits a foul while trying to possess the ball from the opposing team. Now, instead of giving a foul and a free kick all the time whenever that foul happens, the game developer can apply a probability so that the game rewards with a direct freekick only 98 percent of all the fouls. As a result, most of the time, the player gets a direct freekick; but when that remaining two percent happens, it can provide emotional feedback to the players from both the teams (assuming that you are playing against another human). The other player would feel angry...