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)

Off Mesh Links

Sometimes, there may be some gaps in the scene that can make the navigation meshes disconnected. For example, our agents will not be able to find the path if our slopes are not connected to the walls in our previous examples. Or, we could have set up points where our agents could jump off the wall and onto the plane below. Unity has a feature called Off Mesh Links to connect such gaps. Off Mesh Links can either be set up manually or generated automatically by Unity's NavMesh generator.

Here's the example scene that we're going to build in this example. As you can see, there's a small gap between the two planes. Let's see how connect these two planes using Off Mesh Links:

Scene with off mesh links-NavMesh04-OffMeshLinks.scene

Generated Off Mesh...