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)

Using the ML-Agents Toolkit – a basic example

Now that the everything is installed, we can start using the ML-Agents Toolkit. First, let's explain the three main entities in the toolkit:

  • The Agent: Obviously, the agent is the central object in the ML-Agents Toolkit. An agent is an object that performs an action, receives information from the environment, and can receive rewards for actions.
  • The Brain object: The Brain object is responsible for choosing the agent's actions. At the moment, there are four different Brain types:
    • Player mode: The agent executes actions decided by player input.
    • Heuristic mode: The agent executes actions decided by some hard-coded decision-making system (for example, a Behavior Tree).
    • External mode: The agent executes actions decided by TensorFlow. The brain will communicate with it using the Python API interface.
    • Internal mode...