Unity AI Programming Essentials

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.