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)

Avoiding obstacles

In this section, we will explore obstacle avoidance. As a first step, we need, of course, obstacles. We will set up a scene similar to the one shown in the following screenshot. Then, we will create a script for our character so that it can avoid the obstacles while trying to reach the target point. The algorithm presented here uses the raycasting method, which is very straightforward, but on the other hand, it can only avoid the obstacles that are blocking the path directly in front of it:

A sample scene setup

To create this, we make a few cube entities and group them under an empty game object called Obstacles. We will also create another cube object called Agent and give it our obstacle avoidance script. We will then create a ground plane object to assist in finding a target position:

Here is how the Hierarchy is organized

It is worth noting that this...