Unity AI Programming Essentials

Use Unity3D, a popular game development ecosystem, to add realistic AI to your games quickly and effortlesslyAbout This BookImplement pathfinding, pathfollowing, and use navigation mesh generation to move your AI characters within the game environmentUse 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 themWho This Book Is ForThis 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 LearnApply pathfinding and pathfollowing features using Unity AI pluginsBuild behavior trees for different character typesAcquire the skills to create an enemy attack AIMake use of crowd AI plugins to create realistic crowdsCreate game characters that sense different parts of the environment and adapt to themUse driving AI to handle AI for racing gamesIntegrate AI with Unity's classic animation system and MecanimDesign complex navigation meshes for character movementIn DetailUnity 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. Read more