I sometimes like to watch AI racing themselves and experiment a lot with the ai files. what bothers me most is that the AI doesnt seem to know how to overtake each other. its the same on every aggression setting i give them. if the car ahead goes defensive they always react way to slow and basically bump draft the car ahead. they should be able to react quicker on what the car ahead does. in this example the pov car couldnt overtake for 10+ laps even though its on one of the easiest tracks for overtaking..
It's been a problem for a long time. The AI pulls out of the slipstream too early, as is demonstrated in your video. And then when the do use it properly, and get close to the car in front, they just seem content to sit behind them.
Can´t look at the AI behavior and decision-making the same way you would from the POV of humans because they don´t work and "see" the track same way; even though Spa does offer plenty of overtaking opportunities and a human driver would generally have little difficulty making the pass in the scenario from your video, with the AI as things are at the moment sections that are a) high speed b) narrow and c) full of kinks and flatout corners will make it more tentative than a regular straight because the AI corridors (the areas on the track the AI sees as viable to place himself in at the speed it is currently at) are constantly shifting and narrowing throughout the section; we have introduced several parameters to adjust these corridors dynamically according to the car and specific circumstances it is under as well as some other car or track-specific scalars that vary according to to what is being raced where, but we still have some hard constraints and some inherent conservatism in how we configure those variables purely due to the various possible car / track / settings permutations they might be used under; the AI for this car afterall also needs to be able to race safely at Azure, and Spa might also be used for Truck racing; you might race those combos on a drying track with puddles outside the racing line, and for those scenarios that conservatism comes in handy as even though it can be a bit of a bummer if the AI doesn´t complete a pass it should be able to, the fun is a lot more spoiled if the AI is crashing or causing carnage every other lap. The good news here is that there is plenty we can and will still do to improve this particular aspect of the AI racecraft substantially so it´s not like we are out of ideas; the focus just has been in other higher prioritiy improvements even within the AI itself; many will remember several car / track / corner combos where the AI used to have a hard time navigating safely; those are now if not completely fixed, greatly mitigated and done so without compromising their performance calibration against the player. We are now focusing more on the race strategy side of things but also in process of implementing support for multiple paths (as opposed to the singular ideal path per track they currently have); this will already be a big boost for AI-to-AI racing dynamics with more to come later on. It´s the opposite problem for the most part and the video (I assume captured with v1.6.9.8( shows the AI actually lifting a couple of times because it´s getting too close to the car in front before it´s pulled out to the side as it´s moving too late and too slowly in this specific circumstance; we´ve adjusted these rates in V1.6.9.81 so there is less chance they get boxed in similar circumstances, as a result a bigger number of AI-on-AI overtakes dhould be completed with the latest update - not a huge boost but an improvement all the same.
While i fully understand and approve that the primary focus is on AI driving well instead of being a replica of Wreckfest, i also find it very important that the AI needs to figure out how to overtake instead of yielding all the time every time. Someone asked me "Why do you care what the AI is doing if you do not see them ?" Reason i care is because when i watch the replay back, i then find out i finished higher than i should have because i basically cheated my way through as the AI lost a ton of time not overtaking when they should have, or in case of on-track incidents they slam their brakes instead of going around the crash. In this clip (starting from 0.25 onwards) the AI cars were not able to overtake the leader for 10 whole laps. Regardless of settings i used, this was the scenario every time. Here is hoping that the future updates will improve this.
