Unity 5.x Game AI Programming Cookbook: Build and customize a wide range of powerful Unity AI systems with over 70 hands-on recipes and techniques

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Unity 5.x Game AI Programming Cookbook

Chapter 2. Navigation

In this chapter, we will cover the following recipes:

Representing the world with grids
Representing the world with Dirichlet domains
Representing the world with points of visibility
Representing the world with a self-made navigation mesh
Finding your way out of a maze with DFS
Finding the shortest path in a grid with BFS
Finding the shortest path with Dijkstra
Finding the best-promising path with A*
Improving A* for memory: IDA*
Planning navigation in several frames: time-sliced search
Smoothing a path

Key benefits

Empower your agent with decision making capabilities using advanced minimaxing and Negamaxing techniques

Discover how AI can be applied to a wide range of games to make them more interactive.

Instigate vision and hearing abilities in your agent through collider based and graph based systems

Description

Unity 5 comes fully packaged with a toolbox of powerful features to help game and app developers create and implement powerful game AI. Leveraging these tools via Unity’s API or built-in features allows limitless possibilities when it comes to creating your game’s worlds and characters. This practical Cookbook covers both essential and niche techniques to help you be able to do that and more. This Cookbook is engineered as your one-stop reference to take your game AI programming to the next level. Get to grips with the essential building blocks of working with an agent, programming movement and navigation in a game environment, and improving your agent's decision making and coordination mechanisms - all through hands-on examples using easily customizable techniques. Discover how to emulate vision and hearing capabilities for your agent, for natural and humanlike AI behaviour, and improve them with the help of graphs. Empower your AI with decision-making functions through programming simple board games such as Tic-Tac-Toe and Checkers, and orchestrate agent coordination to get your AIs working together as one.

What you will learn

Use techniques such as Aand Ambush to empower your agents with path finding capabilities.

Create a representation of the world and make agents navigate it

Construct decision-making systems to make the agents take different actions

Make different agents coordinate actions and create the illusion of technical behavior

Simulate senses and apply them in an awareness system

Design and implement AI in board games such as Tic-Tac-Toe and Checkers

Implement efficient prediction mechanism in your agents with algorithms such as N-Gram predictor and naïve Bayes classifier

Understand and analyze how the influence maps work.

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Free for first 7 days. $19.99 p/m after that. Cancel any time!

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Hugo Apr 28, 2016

This is really a Programming AI Cookbook, it is full of algorithms teaching how to create a game with AI, like in the book cover there is over than 70 recipes, this will enable you to achieve almost any kind of behavior that you want to implement, you will learn techniques from intelligent movement, navigation, avoid agents and walls, jump systems, decision making, find the shortest path, the list is very big, and you have to take a little time to understand the concepts, is good to have your Unity open with the book code examples to see the results, and most important try to implement your own behaviors based on the book, this way you can create new AI behaviors, learning with these examples you can create more professional games. I think this book is for people with at least a short experience working in Unity and C#, most of the book is implementing algorithms in code, the visual part is on the example code, but if you are a complete beginner this book can be good if you work hard to learn the basics on the other books like Learning C# in Unity and Unity 5 by example, or in the Unity documentation, tutorials and forum. As a cookbook I you recommend this book for anyone who work with game development in general, this is well written, have a great author and structure, can be a great tool to consult and design your game, If you have an idea and doesn't know where to start, I think that you can easily find here one recipe for a game mechanic to start prototyping your game, or to create a game feature during the game development or to create a post production, this book is a mind blow, you will start to have more ideas or you know where to start the ideas that you thought were more difficult before.

Amazon Verified review

Silverleaf Jul 28, 2016

I am a professional game developer and got this book because it seemed like a good reference to quickly glance at some boiler plate type code to get it up and running quickly in Unity for prototyping without a lot of fuss. While this book does serve pretty well in that capacity I also have a few gripes with it:1. There are a good deal of bugs I've found in the code and I've had to fix them (which is easy for me), BUT this is supposed to be a cookbook with supposedly already tested and stable code. Recipes shouldn't have runtime bugs that need to be fixed by the user before they will work correctly at all. Some of the code doesn't seem like it was ever even test run at all before publishing. As an example, I found several bugs in the A* code as well as the SetNeighbours() code in the get8 branch where that code has a basic bug that makes it only get 5 neighbors instead of the 8 it should be (the j loop was missing a + 1 on the max count). Then in addition to that, the same code can crash when indexing into the array using the 'c' value because based on the non-clamped values, the 'c' variable can become < 0 and causes an unhandled runtime exception. This is just one example of the types of issues I've run in to.2. I did not like that in order to find relevant code to one recipe, you have to thumb forward or backwards to other recipes you don't really care about in order to find missing method dependencies in the recipe you DO care about. This is a cookbook, but it reads more like one long tutorial spread over many sub-articles instead. It would have been better if all that code was maybe all put into a code index that was easily searchable by some tag id in the book like: Code Listing 1, etc. Instead I actually had to get manually 'search' other recipes and read them in order to track down missing code. :/3. The web link provided in the book for the GPWiki PriorityQueue is a dead link. The page doesn't even come up. So I had to just implement my own priority queue and shoehorn that in to the recipe code. (which was fun actually), but still, the book should make sure links on a book this new are actually valid?

Amazon Customer Apr 05, 2017

I found the code more confusing than helpful and somewhat disorganized. I've been coding AI most of my professional life (15+ yrs) and I found this book difficult to use. It might be okay as a book for beginners who don't really want to understand AI but just get something working, but I don't think it's even properly organized for that purpose. I'd recommend one of the Game AI Wisdom books or perhaps AI Game Programming Wisdom.

Sparo Vigil & Mick Macha Mar 10, 2018

Coming from a programming background in other fields and expecting a reasonable handbook to implementing AI in Unity, I have been disappointed in this book on multiple fronts. The author seems to have only a cursory understanding of C# programming (littering his code with unnecessary and obfuscating behavior like initializing structs to their default value), rarely discusses the actual meaning of his source code in detail, and goes so far as to reinvent the wheel on multiple occasions. As an example, he completely ignores Unity's built-in tools for managing state machines, in turn choosing to write a less capable one himself. All of chapter three is spent on that, which is roughly an eighth of the book, with no mention of Mecanim cover to cover.It is clear to me that he is simply unprepared to write a guide on this subject, let alone a cookbook. If you want to understand Unity, anything is better, inclusive of the on-site documentation. If you want to understand soft AI as applied to games, I might suggest Programming Game AI by Example, by Mat Buckland; it uses C++ instead of C#, but the descriptions are much clearer. If you need an actual cookbook, I would strongly suggest getting any other one, even if it requires a broader scope than Unity alone; it will still save you time.