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)

Following a path

A path is a sequence of points in the game, connecting a point, A, to another point, B. There are many ways to build a path. Usually, a path is automatically generated by other game systems, such as pathfinding (see the next chapter); however, in our example, we, use a very basic system: we will construct the path by hand by using waypoints. We will write a script called Path.cs and store all the waypoint positions in a Vector3 array. Then, from the editor, we will enter those positions manually. It's a bit of a tedious process right now, but we don't want to make things too complicated. Fortunately, since the number of waypoints that we are creating here is not that substantial, the operation should not take too much time:

Object path

First, we create an empty game entity and add our path script component, as shown in the following screenshot:

Here...