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)

Basic sensory systems

An AI sensory system emulates senses such as sight, hearing, and even smell to get information from other game objects. In such a system, the NPCs need to examine the environment and check for such senses periodically based on their particular interest.

In a minimal sensory system, we have two principal elements: Aspect and Sense. Every sense is capable of perceiving a specific aspect: for instance, an NPC with the sense of hearing can perceive the sound (the aspect) emitted by another game object, or a zombie NPC can use its smell sense to prey on the player's brain. As in real life, NPCs are not forced to use a single sense; they can have many such as sight, smell, and touch.

For our demo, we are going to implement a base interface, called Sense, that we'll use to implement custom senses. In this chapter, we'll implement sight and touch...