Unity Artificial Intelligence Programming - Fourth Edition

Path following and steering

Sometimes we want our AI characters to roam around in the game world, following a roughly guided or thoroughly defined path. For example, in a racing game, the AI opponents need to navigate on the road, and the simple reactive algorithms, such as our flocking boid algorithm discussed already, are not powerful enough to solve this problem. Still, in the end, it all comes down to dealing with actual movements and steering behaviors. Steering behaviors for AI characters have been in research topics for a couple of decades now. One notable paper in this field is Steering Behaviors for Autonomous Characters, again by Craig Reynolds, presented in 1999 at the Game Developers Conference (GDC). He categorized steering behaviors ...