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)

Putting It All Together

Over the previous nine chapters, we've looked at various AI techniques and built some simple demo applications using Unity3D. This is the final chapter in our book, in which we'll apply some of those techniques to a more complex game example. The techniques we'll be using in this chapter include navigation meshes and finite-state machines (FSMs), but, more importantly, we will learn how to navigate and add AI into a pre-existing complex game. So, unlike the other chapters, this is a much more of a real-world scenario.

In this chapter, we'll add AI to a simple tank combat game. The game we'll start with is based on the TANKS! official Unity tutorial, which was in turn inspired by a historic tank game called Combat for the Atari 2600. In its default version, this is a straightforward multiplayer game. Each player takes control of...