Unity 2018 Artificial Intelligence Cookbook (eBook)

Interactive and engaging games come with intelligent enemies, and this intellectual behavior is combined with a variety of techniques collectively referred to as Artificial Intelligence. Exploring Unity's API, or its built-in features, allows limitless possibilities when it comes to creating your game's worlds and characters. This cookbook covers both essential and niche techniques to help you take your AI programming to the next level.
To start with, you'll quickly run through the essential building blocks of working with an agent, programming movement, and navigation in a game environment, followed by improving your agent's decision-making and coordination mechanisms - all through hands-on examples using easily customizable techniques. You'll then discover how to emulate the vision and hearing capabilities of your agent for natural and humanlike AI behavior, and later improve the agents with the help of graphs. This book also covers the new navigational mesh with improved AI and pathfinding tools introduced in the Unity 2018 update. You'll empower your AI with decision-making functions by programming simple board games, such as tic-tac-toe and checkers, and orchestrate agent coordination to get your AIs working together as one.
By the end of this book, you'll have gained expertise in AI programming and developed creative and interactive games.

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Explore various recipes to build games using popular artificial intelligence techniques and algorithms such as Navmesh navigation A*, DFS, and UCB1Key FeaturesExplore different algorithms for creating decision-making agents that go beyond simple behaviors and movementDiscover the latest features of the NavMesh API for scripting intelligent behaviour in your game charactersCreate games that are non-predictable and dynamic and have a high replayability factorBook DescriptionInteractive and engaging games come with intelligent enemies, and this intellectual behavior is combined with a variety of techniques collectively referred to as Artificial Intelligence. Exploring Unity's API, or its built-in features, allows limitless possibilities when it comes to creating your game's worlds and characters. This cookbook covers both essential and niche techniques to help you take your AI programming to the next level.To start with, you'll quickly run through the essential building blocks of working with an agent, programming movement, and navigation in a game environment, followed by improving your agent's decision-making and coordination mechanisms - all through hands-on examples using easily customizable techniques. You'll then discover how to emulate the vision and hearing capabilities of your agent for natural and humanlike AI behavior, and later improve the agents with the help of graphs. This book also covers the new navigational mesh with improved AI and pathfinding tools introduced in the Unity 2018 update. You'll empower your AI with decision-making functions by programming simple board games, such as tic-tac-toe and checkers, and orchestrate agent coordination to get your AIs working together as one.By the end of this book, you'll have gained expertise in AI programming and developed creative and interactive games.What you will learnCreate intelligent pathfinding agents with popular AI techniques such as A* and A*mbushImplement different algorithms for adding coordination between agents and tactical algorithms for different purposesSimulate senses so agents can make better decisions, taking account of the environmentExplore different algorithms for creating decision-making agents that go beyond simple behaviors and movementCreate coordination between agents and orchestrate tactics when dealing with a graph or terrainImplement waypoints by making a manual selectorWho this book is forThe Unity 2018 Artificial Intelligence Cookbook is for you if you are eager to get more tools under your belt to solve AI- and gameplay-related problems. Basic knowledge of Unity and prior knowledge of C# is an advantage.