Unity 5.x Game AI Programming Cookbook

Build and customize a wide range of powerful Unity AI systems with over 70 hands-on recipes and techniques

About This Book

• Empower your agent with decision making capabilities using advanced minimaxing and Negamaxing techniques
• Discover how AI can be applied to a wide range of games to make them more interactive.
• Instigate vision and hearing abilities in your agent through collider based and graph based systems

Who This Book Is For

This book is intended for those who already have a basic knowledge of Unity and are eager to get more tools under their belt to solve AI and gameplay-related problems.

What You Will Learn

• Use techniques such as A*and A*mbush to empower your agents with path finding capabilities.
• Create a representation of the world and make agents navigate it
• Construct decision-making systems to make the agents take different actions
• Make different agents coordinate actions and create the illusion of technical behavior
• Simulate senses and apply them in an awareness system
• Design and implement AI in board games such as Tic-Tac-Toe and Checkers
• Implement efficient prediction mechanism in your agents with algorithms such as N-Gram predictor and naive Bayes classifier
• Understand and analyze how the influence maps work.

In Detail

Unity 5 comes fully packaged with a toolbox of powerful features to help game and app developers create and implement powerful game AI. 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 practical Cookbook covers both essential and niche techniques to help you be able to do that and more.
This Cookbook is engineered as your one-stop reference to take your game AI programming to the next level. Get to grips with the essential building blocks of working with an agent, programming movement and navigation in a game environment, and improving your agent's decision making and coordination mechanisms - all through hands-on examples using easily customizable techniques. Discover how to emulate vision and hearing capabilities for your agent, for natural and humanlike AI behaviour, and improve them with the help of graphs. Empower your AI with decision-making functions through programming simple board games such as Tic-Tac-Toe and Checkers, and orchestrate agent coordination to get your AIs working together as one.

Style and approach

This recipe-based guide will take you through implementing various AI algorithms. Each topic is explained and placed among other related techniques, sometimes building on the knowledge from previous chapters. There are also references to more technical books and papers, so you can dig deeper if you want to.