Unity Ai Programming Essentials - Softcover

Bennett, Curtis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1783553553 ISBN 13: 9781783553556

Publisher: Packt Pub Ltd, 2014

Synopsis

Use Unity3D, a popular game development ecosystem, to add realistic AI to your games quickly and effortlessly

About This Book

• Implement pathfinding, pathfollowing, and use navigation mesh generation to move your AI characters within the game environment
• Use behaviour trees to design logic for your game characters and make them “think”
• A practical guide that will not only cover the basics of AI frameworks but also will teach how to customize them

Who This Book Is For

This book is aimed at developers who know the basics of game development with Unity and want to learn how to add AI to their games. You do not need any previous AI knowledge; this book will explain all the essential AI concepts and show you how to add and use them in your games.

What You Will Learn

• Apply pathfinding and pathfollowing features using Unity AI plugins
• Build behavior trees for different character types
• Acquire the skills to create an enemy attack AI
• Make use of crowd AI plugins to create realistic crowds
• Create game characters that sense different parts of the environment and adapt to them
• Use driving AI to handle AI for racing games
• Integrate AI with Unity's classic animation system and Mecanim
• Design complex navigation meshes for character movement

In Detail

Unity is a powerful cross-platform game creation system that includes a game engine and integrated development environment (IDE). AI programming in Unity is a key task for any game developer as it gives you the ability to make computer characters think and behave like a living organism.

This book focuses on the different AI tasks that are essential for game development using Unity. It includes topics such as defining "minds" for your characters with behavior trees. Furthermore, it covers more specialized AI tasks such as how to implement AI crowds and how to create driving AI for vehicles. We have a section dedicated to NavMesh, one of the most important aspects of pathfinding, that will show you how to customize the mesh generation to handle different use cases for different characters. This is a practical book as it uses several popular Unity plugins such as RAIN and React AI to accomplish different AI tasks.

About this title

About the Author

Curtis Bennett

Curtis Bennett has been a developer in the games and computer graphics industry for several years. He has worked on developing immersive virtual environments, published research in visual simulation, taught college courses in game development, and worked for various game studios, and he was also an engineer on early versions of the RAIN AI plugin for Unity. Currently, he is the Technical Director for Creative Services at Ideum, which focuses on creating interactive media projects.

Dan Violet Sagmiller

Dan Violet Sagmiller has always had a strong passion for game development, although most of his work leads him to senior business development roles. He developed several games, including Teams RPG, a space shooter (which won a game development competition at Technology Center of DuPage), and some casual games. He started teaching game development at Heartland Community College in 2005, taking over the existing course and expanding it to six courses. Later, he took a position with Microsoft and expanded the game development curriculum for Bellevue College, including classes on AI, physics, testing and designing using C# and XNA. Later, he moved on to a senior position with Wizards of the Coast, where he also taught game development and AI internally. He also has given talks at multiple schools about getting into game development and programming as a career. More recently, he released a game development book on C# and XNA, which had 2,000 downloads in the first week. He also runs Learn Build Play, a small private school dedicated to teaching game development and design mostly with C# and Unity 3D. He can be contacted at Dan.Sagmiller@LearnBuildPlay.com.

Edition details

• Publisher: Packt Pub Ltd
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1783553553
• ISBN 13: 9781783553556
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 162