When you think about game AI, first you probably think about things such as creating virtual minds and making characters "think". When I first started learning about game AI years ago, I didn't think animation was really important for game AI since it wasn't part of creating a virtual mind. But then I attended some AI sessions at the Game Developers Conference and found out that one of the most discussed topics in AI was integrating AI with animation systems; this is when I realized it really is an important part of game AI. This makes sense since game AI is about modeling real thinking instead of focusing on giving characters the appearance of thinking, so having the characters play animations that match their state is important. We can think of animations as just a visual depiction of the current state of the character.

The method we'll look at for integrating animations with the AI is RAIN's animation integration with Unity. RAIN has an Animation tab (with an icon...