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 generate and use navigation meshes to represent the scene for pathfinding purposes. We studied how to set up different navigation layers with different costs for pathfinding. We used the Nav Mesh Agent component to find the path and move toward the target using the destination property. We set up Off Mesh Links to connect the gaps between the navigation meshes using both the autogeneration feature and a manual setup with the Off Mesh Link component.

With all this information, we can now easily create simple games with a fairly complicated AI. For example, you can try to set the destination property of AI tanks to the player's tank's position and make them follow it. Using simple FSMs, they can start attacking the player once they reach a certain distance. However, FSMs have taken us far, but they have their limits. In the next...