Developing games is a passion for some, and I believe that this is because we are able to create a world that is completely imagined by us; this is like being a god, and the AI characters that we place there are the habitants of that world that we have just created. We are free to imagine how they will behave, we can create a society according to our imagination, we are able to create a sweet and kind character, but also we can create the most devilish character that ever existed--the possibilities are endless, and that is why we will always have new game ideas coming out. No matter what game genre we decide to develop, the world and their characters will be the essence of our vision; this is what will make our game unique, and ideally we should be able to create everything that we have in mind, just as we imagine. This book was conceived with that in mind, that all of us should be able to create the ideas that we have and that we shouldn't limit our imagination, so this book will cover the foundations of creating an artificial character, and after reading it, we should be able to explore all the topics that you have learned, creating AI characters that fit perfectly with what we have imagined.
Chapter 1, Different Problems Require Different Solutions, is a brief introduction to the video game industry and game AI.
Chapter2, Possibility and Probability Maps, focuses on how to create and use probability and possibility maps for AI characters.
Chapter 3,Production Systems, describes how to create a set of rules necessary for the character AI to achieve their goals.
Chapter 4, Environment and AI, focuses on the interaction between the characters in the game and their environment.
Chapter 5, Animation Behaviors, shows best practices to implement animations in our game.
Chapter 6, Navigation Behavior and Pathfinding, focuses on how to calculate the best options for the AI to move in real time.
Chapter 7, Advanced Pathfinding, focuses on the use of theta algorithms to find short and realistic-looking paths.
Chapter 8, Crowd Interactions, focuses on how the AI should behave when there are a lot of characters on the same scene.
Chapter 9, AI Planning and Collision Avoidance, discusses the anticipation of the AI, knowing in advance what they will do when arriving at a position or facing a problem.
Chapter 10, Awareness, focuses on working with awareness systems to create stealth genre mechanics.
It is recommended that you have install a game engine that uses C# (Unity3D has a free version, and it was used for the examples covered on the book).
This book is intended for developers who have already created their first games in C# and seek to expand their capabilities with AI, creating crowds, enemies, or allies that can behave autonomously.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "The variables that we'll be using for now are Health, statePassive, stateAggressive, and stateDefensive."
A block of code is set as follows:
if (playerPosition == "triggerM")
{
transform.LookAt(playerSoldier); // Face the direction of the player
transform.position = Vector3.MoveTowards(transform.position,
buildingPosition.position, walkBack);
backwardsFire();
} New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "In Unity we click under the Layers button to expand more options, and then we click where it says Edit Layers...."
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