Book Image

Unity 2018 Artificial Intelligence Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Jorge Palacios
Book Image

Unity 2018 Artificial Intelligence Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Jorge Palacios

Overview of this book

Interactive and engaging games come with intelligent enemies, and this intellectual behavior is combined with a variety of techniques collectively referred to as Artificial Intelligence. Exploring Unity's API, or its built-in features, allows limitless possibilities when it comes to creating your game's worlds and characters. This cookbook covers both essential and niche techniques to help you take your AI programming to the next level. To start with, you’ll quickly run through the essential building blocks of working with an agent, programming movement, and navigation in a game environment, followed by improving your agent's decision-making and coordination mechanisms – all through hands-on examples using easily customizable techniques. You’ll then discover how to emulate the vision and hearing capabilities of your agent for natural and humanlike AI behavior, and later improve the agents with the help of graphs. This book also covers the new navigational mesh with improved AI and pathfinding tools introduced in the Unity 2018 update. You’ll empower your AI with decision-making functions by programming simple board games, such as tic-tac-toe and checkers, and orchestrate agent coordination to get your AIs working together as one. By the end of this book, you’ll have gained expertise in AI programming and developed creative and interactive games.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Creating and managing Scriptable Objects

As developers, we usually need to store and load data persistently. We've probably used some formats in the past, such as XML, JSON, and CSV via text files. As such, we know it takes development time to support changes and iterations throughout the project. Much of this data is used to set up the game and shape levels, enemies, and the whole game mechanics.

As Unity developers, we harness the power of the Inspector window via public/serialized member variables; however, it makes more sense to store these values in a persistent file—that's why the ScriptableObject class exists. In this recipe, we will be exploring its value.

Getting ready

We will illustrate the use...