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

by Jorge Palacios

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. Jorge Palacios is a software developer with seven years of professional experience. He has committed the last four years to game development working in various positions; from tool developer, to lead programmer. His main focus is AI and gameplay programming, and currently he works with Unity and HTML5. He's also a game development instructor, speaker, and game jam organizer. You can find more about him on

278 pages, Paperback

Published March 31, 2016

Reviews

[João · Rating 2 out of 5]

Essentially commented code - and badly commented at that. For each recipe, I found that one of three things happened:
1) You'd seen it before, so it made sense and wasn't particularly useful.
2) You'd not seen it before and it wasn't super insightful, in which case you spend a whole lot of time figuring out why the code is the way it is, since the author's explanations/intuition are severely limited.
3) You'd not seen it before, and it had some non-trivial theory behind it, so you can't really get it from just looking at code.

Two stars for the occasional cute bit of code :)