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)

Scene with slope

Let's build a scene with some slopes, like this:

Scene with slopes-NavMesh02-Slope.scene

One important thing to note is that the slopes and the wall should be in contact with each other. Objects need to be perfectly connected when creating such joins in the scene, with the purpose of generating a NavMesh later. Otherwise, there'll be gaps in the NavMesh, and the agents will not be able to find the path anymore. There's a feature called Off Mesh Link generation to solve this kind of problem. We will look at Off Mesh Links in the Off Mesh Links section later in this chapter. For now, let's concentrate on building the slope:

  1. Make sure to connect the slope properly:
A well-connected slope
  1. We can adjust the Max Slope property in the Navigation window's Bake tab according to the level of slope in our scenes that we want to allow the agents...