Book Image

Unity 2017 Game AI Programming - Third Edition - Third Edition

Book Image

Unity 2017 Game AI Programming - Third Edition - Third Edition

Overview of this book

Unity 2017 provides game and app developers with a variety of tools to implement Artificial Intelligence. 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 third edition with Unity will help you break down Artificial Intelligence 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 5. Further on you will learn 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 will then learn how to implement simple flocks and crowd's dynamics, key AI concepts. Moving on, you will learn how to implement a behavior tree through a game-focused example. Lastly, you'll combine fuzzy logic concepts with state machines and apply all the concepts in the book to build a simple tank game.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

Summary

Game AI and academic AI have different objectives. Academic AI researchers try to solve real-world problems and prove a theory without much limitation in terms of resources. Game AI focuses on building NPCs within limited resources that seem to be intelligent to the player. The objective of AI in games is to provide a challenging opponent that makes the game more fun to play.

We learned briefly about the different AI techniques that are widely used in games such as FSMs, sensor and input systems, flocking and crowd behaviors, path following and steering behaviors, AI path finding, Navigation Meshes, behavior trees, and fuzzy logic.

In the following chapters, we'll look at fun and relevant ways you can apply these concepts to make your game more fun. We'll start off right away in Chapter 2, Finite State Machines and You, with our own implementation of an FSM, and we'll dive into the concepts of agents and states and how they are applied to games.