Unity releases deeply upsetting trailer for its new AI development tools
When it comes to game development, Unity is the lifeblood of many indie studios. The company’s cross-platform engine has been downloaded more than 33 billion times, making it the world’s most popular real-time 3D and virtual reality development tool. It’s the engine behind titles like Cuphead, Monument Valley and Gwent. It’s the choice of big-name studios like Ubisoft and EA, too. And it’s the engine that aims to democratize 3D gaming.
The latest version of Unity focuses on artificial intelligence and machine learning, helping developers create intelligent characters and objects that will be more responsive to player input. It also makes the process of developing AI easier than ever by introducing new features that let designers focus on the more complex and interesting aspects of their games.
While these additions are exciting, they also raise concerns about the potential of generative AI to put workers out of jobs. But if used properly, this form of AI can help creators develop and iterate faster. The most important thing is for developers to understand how this technology works and how it can be leveraged to make their games better.
Creating a new game is a complicated task. Developing a new game requires the expertise of a team of professionals with various skillsets. This includes designers, artists and programmers. But even for indie developers, the process of building a new game is costly. That’s why having a platform that can simplify the process and help you save time is incredibly valuable. Unity’s new AI tools offer that exact functionality, and if you take advantage of them, it could allow you to create your next project much quicker than before.
One of the most useful tools in Unity’s arsenal is its ML-Agents, a collection of libraries that you can use to implement reinforcement learning and other machine learning algorithms into your games. These are the same concepts that power systems like Google DeepMind and Amazon Alexa use, so it’s not surprising that they would be used within the Unity engine to help bring your games to life. The ML-Agents collection of library offers a range of functions, from detecting object shapes and textures to generating random content in your game.
The most recent feature in Unity is a new Machine Learning (ML) Agents plugin that allows developers to add ML-based intelligence to their game with just a few clicks of a button. The plugin provides a wide selection of pre-built ML models that can be used in games to provide a variety of effects such as object detection and style transfer.
Another helpful tool in Unity’s arsenal is this tutorial by Dave / GameDevelopment, which introduces you to the basics of implementing behavior trees for AI enemies in your game. The tutorial starts out with some theory before jumping right into Unity, where you’ll learn how to create a patrolling state, a chasing state and an attacking state for your enemy AI. The tutorial explains the logic behind these states, as well as how to adapt your created decision tree into C# code that will control an enemy’s actions in-game.
