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)

Setting up the tank

The example project also includes a prefab for the tank, which is simply called (you guessed it) Tank, inside the Prefabs folder.

The tank itself is a simple agent with one goal: reach the end of the maze. As mentioned earlier, the player has to help the tank out along the way by activating its abilities to keep it safe from oncoming fire from the towers.

By now, you should be fairly familiar with the components you'll encounter along the way, except for the Tank.cs component attached to the prefab. Let's take a look at the code to figure out what's going on behind the scenes:

using UnityEngine; 
using System.Collections; 
 
public class Tank : MonoBehaviour { 
    [SerializeField] 
    private Transform goal; 
    private NavMeshAgent agent; 
    [SerializeField] 
    private float speedBoostDuration = 3; 
    [SerializeField] 
    private ParticleSystem...