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)

Summary

In this chapter, we learned how to implement the A* pathfinding algorithm in Unity3D. We implemented our own A* pathfinding class, as well as our grid class, priority queue class, and node class. We learned about the IComparable interface and how to override the CompareTo method to implement our custom ordering policy. We used debug draw functionalities to visualize the grid and path information.

In later chapters, we will see that with Unity3D's NavMesh and NavAgent features, it may not be necessary for you to implement a custom pathfinding algorithm on your own. Nonetheless, having an understanding of a basic pathfinding algorithm gives you a better foundation for getting to grips with many other advanced pathfinding techniques.

In the next chapter, we will look at how to extend the idea behind the A* algorithm as we look at navigation meshes.

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