Davide Aversa - Unity Artificial Intelligence Programming

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First published: July 2013
Second edition: September 2015
Third edition: January 2018
Fourth edition: November 2018

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Dr. Davide Aversa holds a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence and an M.Sc. in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics from the University of Rome "La Sapienza" in Italy. He has a strong interest in Artificial Intelligence for the development of Interactive Virtual Agents and Procedural Content Generation (PCG). He serves at the PC of videogame-related conferences such as the IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG) and he also is regularly participating in game-jam contests. He also writes a blog on Game Design and game development.

Aung Sithu Kyaw is passionate about graphics programming, creating video games, writing, and sharing knowledge with others. He holds an MSc degree in digital media technology from the Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. He worked as a research associate, which involved implementing a sensor-based real-time movie system using Unreal Development Kit. In 2011, he founded a tech start-up focusing on interactive media productions and backend server-side technologies.

Clifford Peters is a programmer and a computer scientist. He has reviewed the following Packt Publishing books: Unity Game Development Essentials, Unity 3D Game Development by Example Beginner's Guide, Unity 3 Game Development Hotshot, Unity 3.x Game Development by Example Beginner's Guide, Unity iOS Game DevelopmentBeginner's Guide, and Unity iOS Essentials.

Deepak Jadhav is a Game Developer based in Pune, India. Deepak received his Bachelors Degree in Computer Technology and Master's Degree in Game Programming and Project Management. Currently, He is working as Game Developer in the leading game development company in India. He has been involved in developing games on multiple platforms, such as PC, Mac, mobile. With years of experience in game development, he has a strong background in C# and C++, as well as he has built up skills in platforms including Unity, Unreal Engine, Augmented and Virtual Reality.

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This book is meant to help you to incorporate various Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques into your games. We will discuss decision techniques such as Finite State Machines (FSMs) and behavior trees. We will also look at movement, obstacle avoidance, and flocking. We also show how to follow a path, how to create a path using the A* pathfinding algorithm, and then how to reach a destination using a navigation mesh. As a bonus, we will go into detail about randomness and probability, and then incorporate these ideas into a final project.