Official General AI Comments & Discussion Topic

Interesting that you have AI mistakes at x5, I run them at .5 as even on 1.0 I found them spinning out unrealistically often

 

In comparison to my latest mp sessions the AI causes significantly fewer accidents (even with AI mistakes set to x5).
I kinda like the chaos and I am far from perfect, too.

 

I definitely noted some seemingly incredibly fast AI times in 1.6 at first. I did the TT for one of the combinations and there's quite a few other times posted to that TT board. No one yet is posting as fast S2 times as the 120% AI were.

We're matching them in S1 and S3 pretty much (Donington national)

But I'm reasonably sure now that it must be the AI drafting down the long straight? Because I did a S2 time in traffic during a race against the AI that was a good 3 or 4 tenths quicker than the fastest I managed to do TT (and faster than anyone on the TT board whose ghost I've seen) and I don't believe I got that time from improvement or better cornering.

So if there's a long straight on that track too maybe that explains some of the time difference?

 

I had a great race with the Formula Ultimate G2 at Silverstone. AI 108%, aggression high, 50% race distance, 2x tire wear, dry weather. No mandatory pit stops.

I started from pole and lost the lead as usually before the first corner. I was able to follow the lead car for several laps, when I noticed that his back was sliding coming out of corners. I don't think that I have ever seen such a clear performance drop of an AI car prior to 1.6. Even better, the lead car went into the pits. I pitted one lap later, picked up a 10s penalty for speeding in the pit lane and came back out behind the leader. The lead car eventually pitted a second time, I stayed out a few laps longer. After my second pitstop I came out ahead, the lead car was stuck behind traffic. Since my tires were fresher, I was able to pull away. Not enough to make up the 10s though. I was really happy to see that the AI was affected by tire wear and that having fresher tires actually made a difference. Up to this point it was all very realistic.

Until with one lap to go, everybody, went into the pits for a third time. What a bummer end to what had been a great race. I hope those kinds of things can be looked at and eventually be fixed.

 

Finally got around to try the latest update - and some of them did start to overtake each other! Although it still took them way too long to make the overtake even though they were still sniffing the butt of the car in front all the time, at the very least I managed to saw some overtakes on interlagos and imola which before, would virtually NEVER happen.

Still though, there are a lot of rough edges to be polished with AI vs AI. AIs are still shy to outbrake each other, butt sniffing is still there, attacking and defending are the same way over and over, etc.

 

This is a problem I run into constantly. I want to do longer races but what's the point when the AI always pits too many times?

I did a multi class endurance race at Spielberg yesterday. About 50 laps. A full fuel tank held 22 laps of fuel. The AI was pitting every 12 laps. Fuel tank nowhere near empty and tires had worn only 2%

 

I finally tried AMS2 after 1.6 and I'm enjoying it way more than I ever did previously. Still remain a few physics behaviours on the limit that I'm not sure about, but way less and not as obvious as before. I trust Reiza to keep improving things on that front and it's already in a very good state for me.

However, the few AI races I've done after 1.6 have been disapointing, because of how often I keep seeing groups of 3, 4 or sometimes even 5 AI cars driving like a train, extremely close to each other, almost touching, and yet they keep going in a single file line, for lap after lap, as if these cars were forming a single mechanical worm. I'm talking single class races.

This looks so artificial and I can see the same behaviour in other AI races I've seen on Youtube since 1.6. I would expect that any group of 3 or more cars with similar pace would still see them attempting some moves here and there, sometimes getting side by side and generally spreading out a bit more, instead of this constant single file with no variation, bumper to bumper, for several laps in a row.

This is happening with GT3 cars btw. Haven't tested other classes yet on AI races.

Other than that I'm enjoying all the improvements that were made in other areas.

 

ILLEAGAL OVERTAKE FEATURE

Hey I've been racing on AMS2 on lfm and I've got this situation im about to tell you many times. Im talking about the illegal overtake feature. Most of the times it is wrong and it also counts other car classes. On the video im gonna send you, you can see that there is an lmdh on the side of the track and because I went wide on that corner it tells me that I did an illegal overatake. I was leading the race and because of this I've got a DT. I really see this feature so unecessary, cause if someone overtakes you illegaly you can report it to lfm and they will surely give a penalty for that. Most of the times this feature its so unfair. Also if someone remains stopped on the rolling start you get a penalty for that too. So unfair and unnecesary. So please if you can tell this to the team and look for a solution or just remove it, cause as I said most of the times its wrong and so unfair.

The video:

 

Ok Reiza NEED to figure out what they did right with Road America AI lines because almost none of the major problems I have with AI vs AI racing are there. They are using slipstream properly, spaced out realistically, no butt sniffing, can go side by side through corners, and just satisfying to look at. It shows the potential AMS 2 AI have and I really hope they could bring what Road America AI have to other tracks.

 

I set up a 1 hour practice at Laguna Seca, with 12 LmdH, 12 LMP2, and 16 GT3 gen2, and the AI grouping issues were magnified all over the place, sadly. Groups clumping together, prototypes not managing to pass GT3 on the straight on one occasion because another GT3 was next to it, backing out of moves into corners. I don't think the slower classes help either by holding their lines too much, though I'm less sure of that.

Didn't want to post a negative AI thing really but it was sad to watch from the monitor lol. Obviously Laguna is a smaller track too, which probably makes it worse.

(No custom ai afaik, 102 speed, medium aggression)

On a plus side the cars in the endurance 2 pack are really cool

 

So are they bugged on FCY? Everytime i get one, even in the first few laps lap, AI will pit. Last time was in a 1 hour race, FCY on lap 1 and they still pitted on 2nd lap

 

Did a single class GT3 race at Barcelona to test this behaviour that I complained about, but this time I completed a 15 minute qualifying session before, to see if things would improve. AI skill at 97 with high agression and 20 cars on track (me plus 19 AI).

Completing the qualifying seemed to have helped somewhat, because this time I didn't really saw groups of 3 or 4 AI cars butt-sniffing each other for lap after lap... the weird behaviour itself was still there however, but this time it was in groups of 2 cars only as far as I could notice.

During the qualifying I drove two laps and then I monitored the AI for the rest of the session, and it kinda seems to me like it might be a problem with how the AI is coded do use slipstream. It's as if they "glue" themselves on the back of another car and just get stuck there for way longer and way closer than it would be realistic, particularly noticeable on corners.

An example of what I noticed: cars A and B where driving like this, car A in front and car B behind at such a close distance they could almost touch. This went on for about half a lap, until car C came from behind and passed both cars A and B, and right as C was passing, car B suddenly unglued itself from A and glued itself to C. The move was very sudden and looked artificial, as if there were magnets on the back of the cars.

After this move cars A and C went ahead completely "glued" together until the end of that lap, when A went into the pits.

 

And then if you want to overtake the AI they push you off the track, I experience that myself in the Ginetta G40 class, or they always make a ridiculous swing from right to left at the same point on the track and out of nowhere for no reason. The AI has diminished rather than improved after the update.

 

The AI behavior is definitely better than before; it just needs some fine-tuning, and a few oddities need to be resolved.

Here are the issues I’ve noticed:
- The car behind sticks to the rear of the car in front too much (perfect for NASCAR on ovals, though).
- Sometimes they cut the inside of a corner excessively and end up on the grass (the other night, at the first corner of the Daytona Road Course, there was chaos—AI cut the corner on the grass and crashed directly into the tires).
- Nonsensical strategic decisions during an FCY in the early laps.
- When going side-by-side into a corner, the AI insists on turning at all costs, creating a "magnet effect" that penalizes the player significantly.

That said, their behavior is very human-like and believable. Things improve significantly when using custom AI files. Even in multiclass races, I’ve had intense battles with smooth overtaking of slower cars.

Unlike in other games, I treat the AI here as if they were genuinely human drivers. This approach has allowed me to enjoy and have some exhilarating races. Trying to exploit "tricks" from other games to confuse the AI doesn’t work here (thankfully) and often leads to disaster.

I’m confident that Reiza will continue to refine and perfect the AI over time. The foundation with version 1.6 is definitely solid.
The AI situation in 1.5 was more polished and cohesive, but it might have reached a plateau. With the new version, there's potential to push past that limit.

 

The problem there is, of course, that a lot of people don't play MP games because 'human behaviour' tends to ruin them without any moderation or refereeing of some kind.

There's a reason Valve made L4D AI so they can't friendly fire the player even though 4 people playing co-op can. Because having AI shoot you in the back or punt you off the track is just annoying. Most players will probably think "The game is broken" not "Oooh, that's realistic just like playing against a human"

This is especially the case when, in all other respects the AI are not close to being like people, they fail miserably if that's the goal and always will because if Reiza switched all their development effort to just doing 'human like AI' they'd be highly unlikely to succeed. It's a tough problem to solve and one that is unlikely to be solved by a game developer.

So, if you can't recreate the positive traits of people it's best not to blame the bugs and foibles in the AI by associating them with negative human traits.

I think the biggest problem is it's easy to mitigate some of the issues with the AI drivers by dialing down their skill - but who wants to race against AI where there's no challenge? Well most people probably because that's what everyone seems to do - but one of the things about having a field of AI scaled should be that you can put it on 120% and see where you qualify and place - and perhaps see where you're losing time and improve.

But at the moment I'm finding that the AI just punt you off the track at any opportunity, practise, qualifying or race.

 

I use high aggression and I have very few issues with the AI hitting me, you have to race them as you would a real person and give them space. I do agree with what someone wrote that when you touch them you get that magnetic effect which is pretty annoying, but as far as AI vs player goes they are as good as they have ever been.

 

The problem really is in another quote you said in a different post

And, you see, I said in my post that I don't really want to turn the difficulty down. I'd prefer fast AI that can overtake if they're faster than me but which then gives me a challenge.

As I see it it's either buggy that the AI can't steer around other vehicles, or a poor feature because the developers figured getting the AI to hit the back corner on the way past even when there's enough room would be fun. I don't know which - accident or by design - but it'd be nice if it weren't the case - because dialing the AI speed down so they never overtake is pointless - and, as I said, it happens when you aren't even racing - you can pull right over to the side on blue tyres on a practise lap and they'll tap you to try to make you spin (and obviously succeed occasionally)

 

After messing around with custom AI files I somewhat managed to artificially make AIs overtake each other with aggression on 0.90, defending between 0.40-0.60, and avoidance_of_forced_mistakes on 0.10. Honestly I don't think the first two do that much other than making the attacking car attack more and defending car not moving too erratically, but the last one has the biggest effect since it makes the defending car prone to miss braking point/understeer and gives the attacking car opportunity to overtake. I combined these settings with in-game settings of aggression set to high. The only downside is that the mistakes AI makes include fatal mistakes so there's also increased chance that the AI car will spin instead. For this reason I set the in-game AI mistakes settings to 0.5. I tested these settings on Imola with LMDh which before almost virtually no overtake would happen unless the AIs are caught in traffic and I've seen some overtakes happening in front of me. While I'd love for the overtakes to happen organically for now I can settle with this until future updates