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)

Path-Following and Steering Behaviors

This is a short chapter in which we will implement two Unity3D scenes to explore steering behaviors. In the first example, we will set up a scene with a path and implement a script to make an entity follow this path. In the second example, we will set up a scene with a couple of obstacles, and program an entity to reach a target while avoiding the obstacles.

Obstacle avoidance is a fundamental behavior for game characters when moving around and interacting with the game world. However, usually, obstacle avoidance is used in conjunction with other navigation systems (such as pathfinding or crowd simulations). In this chapter, we will use the systems to make sure that we avoid the other agents and reach the target. We will not talk about how fast the character will reach a destination, and we will not calculate the shortest path to the target...