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)

AI characters

In this example, the AI characters roam around the scene in a random direction. They have two senses: Sight and Touch. The Sight sense checks whether the enemy aspect is within a set visible range and distance. The Touch sense, instead, detects if the enemy aspect has collided with the box collider around the character. As we have seen previously, our player tank has the Enemy aspect. Consequently, these senses are triggered when they detect the player tank.

For now, let's look at the script we use to move the NPCs around. The following is the code in the Wander.cs file:

using UnityEngine; 
using System.Collections; 
 
public class Wander : MonoBehaviour { 
  private Vector3 tarPos; 
 
  private float movementSpeed = 5.0f; 
  private float rotSpeed = 2.0f; 
  private float minX, maxX, minZ, maxZ; 
 
  // Use this for initialization 
  void Start () { 
    minX...