Official General AI Comments & Discussion Topic

Car: F Junior, P1 and probably others.
Track: Cascavel.
Description: The AI takes an unlikely line on the long straight between Curva Seis and the final corner, Curva Sete. They tend to move to the left as if they are going to enter the pits before veering back to the right just before Sete. The quick adjustment before the final corner compromises the AI's speed. Is there a reason for this? Wouldn't it be more logical to stay to the right all along the straight?

The AI seems very good elsewhere although they tend to run a little wide at Esse - I am grateful for this because it gives a rare opportunity to overtake.

 

Spielberg Historic 1977:

Cars exit pits, go very slow and than, all over sudden, they make a hectic move to the racing line. AI which are already on track coming up the start/finish-straight are irritated by this behaviour and try to bypass, which regularly causes carnage or/and a pile-up.

 

Yep, I think they kinda get confused with the upcoming chicane, it doesn't happen in the 74 version of the track.

 

Seems the Brabham BT46B is massively nerfed in the hands of the AI, it's a good 5+ seconds slower than the top times!

 

Major issues with AI still not solved:
- Inability to overtake: Faster AI crawl behind slower ones for ages
- Instead of overtaking car in front, they go for the rear tyres and ram on most of the tracks
- Car in front exaggeratedly braketests you in slow corners, almost stands still before rocketing out, while car from behind attacks like crazy
- AI do stupid lateral moves when you are next to them and often ram
- When being overtaken by player before chicanes, they never step back but try to force their way through by cutting corners and cause accidents. When there are tyre walls, they regularly crash in such situations.

 

The oval AI for the Formula USA 2023 seems to be much more agressive than the CART era Formula USA's. They are not afraid to crowd you, brake and hip check you, and ram you out of the way on low to medium aggression on Indy

 

I think AI overtaking is better now...still far from perfect but definitely better. With all others I completely agree. Especially annoying for me is that: "Car in front exaggeratedly braketests you in slow corners, almost stands still before rocketing out, while car from behind attacks like crazy"

 

I agree with most of that, but what car/track combo the AI brake test and ram you? I am using the F-Juniors lately and been having some excellent wheel to wheel racing with them. Very clean with no shenanigans.

 

I think it happens with high-speed cars...I didn't experience it with F3 and Formula Vee but yestarday while playing DPI Cadillac in Montreal I was rammed by AI in last chicane...
also I can't tell about brake tests, I'd rather call it unnecessary AI slowdown...when I pursue AI it slowdowns but when I pass and AI appears behind me it speedups and attack me

 

I agree, this is very much my experience with the AI since forever.

I recently sarted a recreation of the 1991 F1 championship. Did Long Beach (in place of Phoenix) and Interlagos so far. For context, I installed the 1991 F1 liveries and custom drivers found at RaceDepartament. May be some settings on that file can produce some odd behaviour, but in general I got to the same conclussions when using the vanilla ones.

The most irritating AI behaviour is when they go out of the ideal racing line in their overtaking crazyness. They can go on the outside dirty line, or two wheels (sometimes all the four wheels) over the grass in the inside, without losing any speed and/or grip, and forcing everything as they go through, smashing the player in the process. At Interlagos they can go one AI car on the inside, other AI car on the outside with the player in the middle at Turn 10!!!, only to then park the car at the turn 12 apex while AI car behind tries to overtake you on the inside at any cost.

Another thing that annoys me the most is the lack of balance regarding tyre wear and fuel load when you do full lenght races (81 laps at Long Beach and 72 at Interlagos in my case). In the Long Beach race, AI was able to finish the 81 lap race with only the starting set of tyres, with tyre wear and fuel load barely affecting their race pace. My tyres were almost dead by lap 50, and by lap 58 I was two seconds off my pace forcing me to do a pit stop for fresh rubber, and that was by starting the race from the last place to find out how many laps I could extract from the tyres by looking after them and avoiding lock ups, so very easy on the tyres the entire race.

Another issue is the trial and error process to get a suitable AI level. Long Beach Qualy was at 110% strenght, low aggro. That put me in the upper middle of the pack driving the Gen 4 V8 with manual gears (one of the two Footwork in that mod). Doing the race at that same AI difficulty put me dead last and one second off the worst AI driver. I needed to put AI at 105 to be able to hold on the backmarkers in the race. It's like the AI pace between qualy and a race with full tank loaded has a drop of 2 seconds roughly, while the player, in the same circumstances will suffer a pace drop about 4 seconds at race start, with lap times going lower incrementally as the race evolves (fuel load decreases, tyres get to optimal temps, etc.) until tyres are gone (much earlier than AI ones btw).

That's generally with all car and classes, but it's more and more annoying as the faster the car is, to the point it's not worth to invest any time in doing full lenght races with Formula 1 cars from any era.

I'm aware that AI needs rebalancing after the latest physics developments, but in general those issues were present since the beginning of this project. I will test when v1.5 will be live and update my findings tough.

 

I did a full 71 lap race at Interlagos in the same F-ClassicG4, and there are some findings that concur with yours and others that don't.

Regarding the difference in laptimes between Q and R, yes the delta is too small, but in my case it was for both the AI and myself. I did a mid 1:17s in qualy and by lap 10 was already in the high 19's(used the hard compound for both sessions), the AI was also only 2 seconds more or less slower than their Q speed. So I did not need to adjust the difficulty between sessions.

However regarding tire life I had no issues with wear using the hard compound, don't know which you used, but the hard lasted the whole race without issues. I think the AI only uses that compound for every race,that's why they don't pit. I saw some pit stops but I think they were because of damage or mechanical failures.

Regarding the overtaking, as is well know, they do keep having trouble. In this track, the main issue is on the first corner, they just barge their way on the inside causing one or both AI to spin, however I did not have issues against them myself (medium aggression, 100% difficulty).

All in all, it was a pretty fun race, some variance on the AI strategy would definitely improve the immersion. But there were no mandatory pit stops back then, so it's not totally unrealistic.

 

Seems to be that consistency value does not affect AI during qualifying sessions, I made it 0.01, but no - all drivers were not mixed up, F-USA 2023 all were within 1,3 secs and in the same order, A.Palou always 1st, no lower than 3rd,a nd so on. I changed one riders <qualifying_skill> down to 0.1 to test whether XML file is used, and it worked, rider was the last, several seconds off the pace. But not consistency... it does not work in qualifying.

 

Yes, I guess consistency only affects races. In qualifying, the AI just does short stints of a few laps and this value does not play a role there, as they leave pits rested and in their best shape.

 

Thanks for your reply.

Yes, I'm be able to more or less match their lap times after couple laps in the race when tyres are at temp and fuel load goes down, but for me the issue are those initial laps where the AI goes full blown from lap 1 and have very little variation in lap times the entire race.

If the AI doesn't know how and when to use the different compounds then this is something that needs to be fixed to properly race in this series, or at least I think we need some clarification about which compound AI choose and in what circumstance. For example: AI use softs in Qualy? If I do a 20 laps race, AI use softs for the race too? Without knowing that it's even harder to choose the right AI difficulty if the AI only option is choosing only one compound in order to not have to pit for tyres, depending the amount of laps in the race.

As I don't know what compound the AI decides to use (if there is a way to know without installing third party apps please correct me) I choose "Automatic by weather" thinking the game will put me in the same compound as the AI drivers, but really I don't know if that's the case. In Q I always use the softer compound. If AI uses hards also for Q, there lies the problem with the difficulty I choose, because I would have to set it lower and use hards for Q and R.

I will use hards for Q and R next race and adjust AI accordingly, and then report back if that makes racing the AI better for me. Thanks.

 

Yes, I get the point, but Reiza stated that consistency value affects also "per weekend" basis.Initially setting some intial value (meaning worse weekend overall for AI driver).

 

It does affect their overall pace, it's just not that dramatic and not too often that they lose a lot of skills. I have Graham Hill with a very low consistency value in my F-VintageG2 files and his pace is mostly top 5, but sometimes he languishes in the mid pack ( Qualy and Race).

Also keep in mind the skills of the other drivers, example: If you have 5 drivers with a race or qualy skill range of .90 to .99, and 10 drivers with a range of .50 to .80, even with a consistency value of .10 the fast drivers very rarely lose more than .15 to .20 in their values. They would still end up being faster, even with very low consistency.

I tend to use very low consistency on the fast but erratic drivers and high consistency on the slow drivers, has worked in creating some variance in my races.

 

AI Cars with damaged wings do not pit, but go on racing as if nothing ever happened.
When doing a mandatory stop, the damage does not get repaired, too.

The AI also can hit debris and tyres on track full blast without having a damage.
If human player has contact with debris on track, it can cause severe damage.

 

Indianapolis Road Course:

AI are extremely fast on this track compared to their performance on any other course of the game.
They go like on rails and never fight with grip within the slow corners.
Above that, they drive like maniacs, always forcing me off track coming from behind as if I wasn't there.

 

Watkins Glen
Formula Junior
AI 90/Med
Clear conditions

AI are 10+km/hr faster than the player on the back straight and can easily make up 1+ sec on the player who has their foot to the floor. By contrast there is zero slipstream effect when the AI is in front of the player on the back straight, they simply pull away.

PS Happens with many other classes too, but is particularly egregious for the FJr.

 

Back in the game for a while, I'm surprised that the ai line on spa and monza hasn't been corrected enough.

I don't know what you guys think about it, but I find that at spa, in les combes, turns 8 and 9 the ai don't climb enough on the curb of 8 and go too far to take turn 9 and therefore exit with ridiculously low speed after 9.

At Stavelot, the ia did not climb enough on the left side and once again exited at too low speed after turn 16.

At Monza, turn 7 (2nd Lesmo turn) the ai brakes much too late and still come out with a too low speed.