Unity AI Programming Essentials

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.

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.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Pathfinding
Chapter 2: Patrolling
Chapter 3: Behavior Trees
Chapter 4: Crowd Chaos
Chapter 5: Crowd Control
Chapter 6: Sensors and Activities
Chapter 7: Adaptation
Chapter 8: Attacking
Chapter 9: Driving
Chapter 10: Animation and AI
Chapter 11: Advanced NavMesh Generation