So after purchasing this game a few month ago for a specific reason, which I will come back to later, and reading through this forum with great interest, I started wondering if the developers are aware or are even steering this sim in a direction to fill the rather overlooked niche of singleplayer. Especially with the current availability of the paddock Club I’m interested where the focus of Reiza lies. I always thought that not enough sim developers, if any, see this part as a great selling point for the non competitive simracers. Obviously all of us like close, fair and intense racing. But if you look at these points they are rarely combined and for some will never be combined in online lobbies. Still every sim is competing to bring the best (ranked) multiplayer. I get that it will always be a different feeling to race a fellow human, but there are so many downsides. You might get occasional online races where the participating drivers are racing fair and hard. But what about the other 60% percent of races where some dude just decides to wreck you by parking on the finish line. And what about the guys who are too slow to regularly get opponents. What about the simracers who are just too exhausted to measure themselves against real people after a hard day of work. Some might just want to enjoy great racing in an immersive setting without any pressure and maybe even fear of messing up. I really feel like this group cant be that small. And I can see that Reiza are putting effort in this experience by continuously improving AI and adding features (e.g. Ai customization) while also presumably developing the career mode. On the other side the AI report topic doesn’t seem to be checked anymore since a significant amount of time and the latest development goals were also focusing on the multiplayer side. Which makes me fear that Reiza are probably overstraining themselves by trying too much to bring the overall simracing experience. And now to the point of why my friends and I bought this sim: It is so convenient to set up a lobby with a player/AI mix Reiza do you know how great that is? No other sim makes it this easy. Some can do it, but its way more complicated (rF2) or costly (iRacing) And I feel like this kind of feature especially needs to be easily used. I think you just have to take a look at the success the coop career mode in the F1 titles was to see that there are so many racers on the more relaxed, less competitive side that really enjoy driving together with a friend on a full grid and progressing through a season. If Reiza could improve the AI compared to the competition (sadly probably iRacing out of all the sims) which honestly in current times is ridiculously easy to do, especially when looking at track to track, corner to corner and condition to condition consistency) and maybe further add a feature where you can set up online mixed Player/AI championships with your friends I think that would be huge and something new on the racing sim market. I refuse to believe that the group of simracers who just want to have nice racing in an immersive championship setting, maybe with a friend or two (or even more in my case), without the tryhard and appointment struggle of league racing or the carnage of online lobbies or even ranked servers (lets be honest it will always be a thing in online racing) is so small that they cant boost the sales of this sim immensely. At the time my friends and I are helping ourselves with an excel sheet, manually typing in the results while being constricted to racing series with less than 32 liveries and not too few as to not have different AI drivers from race to race, all while needing to test every tracks Ai strength just to realise that on many tracks the AI is just massively slow or fast in a particular section or corner. And then being blocked on every Qualifying attempt by AIs leaving the pits (especially great in the last seconds of the session when there isn’t even enough time for the AI to start a lap) And finally being crashed by AI moving in the braking zone in the race or being completely outpaced because the AI doesn’t suffer from additional 80KG of fuel. The list could go on. BUT still I have to say I really really like this AI, its bite and willingness to fight. And I didn’t have that much fun against AI since the R3E AI of 2016(?) before they increased the AI grid size to 99 cars and massively downgraded the AI code. And that AI was everything I ever wished for. If R3E could do that, it must be possible again. I don’t know, I just wanted to post this to bring attention to this kind of playerbase or to check if the attention may even be there. So what are your thoughts? Am I wrongly assessing the market, being completely blinded by my wishful thinking or are there others who really wish to finally have consistent, non competitive but great and immersive racing on their own or even with a few friends?
AMS2 is clearly not. True, AMS2 AI in 2020 was atrocious. In 2023 it can be fun. Still has loads of issues though. I sure hope not. I suppose developing career mode would be quite time consuming, there are so many other key areas underdeveloped that I believe should be tackled before even thinking about it. They are definitely working on AI, no question about it. Oh how I wish this was true. MP is the most underdeveloped aspect of AMS2, and the future of MP in AMS2 seems a little bit hopeless. Nobody expects AMS2 to be the next iRacing. The goal should be being at least as good as AMS1... This is true. However there is a small caveat: the faster the cars are and the worse the latency in the lobby, the less the AI is aware of all the other players that are not the host. This is one of the main issues with the racecraft.online service - when you are not the host, racing the AI can be a huge pain in the arse. [/QUOTE] I think you are correct. In fact, from my experience here, the AMS2 community is majorly composed of drivers who don't care to race online at all. Finally, I think many offline drivers seem to have this misconception that every person who prefers to race online is competitive and wants to improve their status/rating/whatever. I certainly prefer racing online for a simple reason: to me AI will not be as fun as racing humans for quite a while. They are too artificial, they don't race on the same physics as the human drivers, they follow strict patterns that once you figure it out it kills any immersion. Usually offline drivers would then express how chaotic racing online can be. How races are just crashfest and all of that. That is not true for friendly leagues.
I wouldn’t say that they aren’t trying to bring a better MP experience, but they haven’t brought any big updates to it. I think it’s due to them having do go through code to try and find the problem
+1 to more offline (or small group) Features Like career, better AI, better championships, etc. For me this is one key point why I struggle so hard with Racing Sims. I have not the time to meet up in online lobbies with a player field which is mostly poorly balanced and in the end ruining the Race for me (and in particular the others) because I mess Up something, or Real Life breaks in and I cannot hit the pause button. Don't get me wrong. I do get the need of others to compete against REAL persons and thumbs up for everyone who can manage this in his Life. But for me I am in a point of life where I want to switch in the computer and have a good time for about an hour or two , without too much pressure, or closing the door so my wife, Kids, friends or neighbours won't bother me Yeah of course I could have all this in the Arcade Racer section. But to be honest those Games bore me and I don't see any challenge when the cars behave like a Toy-Car . And in my opinion there must be a lot others in the same Situation, or am I wrong ? This was the reason why I purchased AMS2 in 2020 because IT offered the best AI features. After coming back three years later it sadly didn't improve the way I expected
Fully agree with this. No immersion (for me) because I know that they not even in the slightest way are intelligent but more or less just scripted + following some simple rules (if this - then that). But when I on top of this does know that they not even does obey the same semi-realistic physics laws that my virtual car are governed by - then yeah there is only 2 modes left in AMS2 for people like me. MP or TT. And because the AMS2 MP system is as it is AND the MP player base are so small in the formula cars Im interested in then there is only TT left for me. Because here I at least feel Im competing with skilled human drivers. But not in real time I admit
I am really looking Forward to V1.5. With the AI Bugs ( mandatory pit) it is kinda unplayable for my game Style right now. Don't get me wrong I really like the rest of AMS2 but it doesn't give any immersive "Race experience" when just playing offline. TT is great and makes a lot of fun but ist getting boring after a while.
I did not say they are not trying to bring a better MP experience. I said they are clearly not trying to be the best, as stated by OP. Bringing up the MP experience to AMS1 level is good enough.
I left iRacing before they introduced their socalled AI cars - but taken from (mainly biased) sources on the net then it sounds like iRacing has produced the best compromise between un-intelligent scripted AI and the theoretically much more advanced "real" intelligent AI like what Sony are trying to manage with Sophy in Grand Turismo. ByTheWay: My guess is that with the introduction of as example ChatGPT we are on a brink of some more advanced AI in many different game areas. Like racing games. And in a few years people will laugh about how plain dumb socalled game AI is today.
Yes, of course. I exaggeratedd there, and AMS2 wasnt meant by that. The point still stands. Assetto Corsa feels like the last sim which didnt bother to bring online ranked. But to be honest I don't have the full picture. The development updates show that, I mean they mentioned the balancing in particular. Therefore I was wondering why there are no longer reactions to the posted reports in the AI topic. Maybe they changed their way of handling this? Thanks for the information, we were suspecting it from our experience. But it sounds difficult to fix. I hope this is something they are looking in to when talking about Multiplayer improvements I get that, as I mentioned in the post. Its definitely feels different to pull a well crafted move on a real person. But I raced in several leagues which were very clean and had big grid sizes in several sims and the close battles fought can be counted on two hands. That might be due to me being stuck between aliens and normal peoples pace, but I think this further shows how hard and rare it can be for many people to get enjoyable online racing. Id rather take more battles with less quality and less frustration. The immersion when racing against AI can come from many more things than just the door to door racing. Also as someone else said in this thread I feel like Simracing AIs could really change in the coming years. Straight4 developing GTR Revolution (or whatever it will be called) certainly puts some effort into using this technology. So maybe the collaboration of the studios will help in regards to AI. Maybe in the close future there will be AI personalities which are trained on Real racing drivers driving. And to be honest if an actual AI is trained by real humans which know their craft I dont really mind anymore about the difference, if its an biological or artficial brain
This training via watching human drivers behaviour is a mandatory part of AIs deep learning process. But what facinates me is that such neural network based AI systems as part of the training and trial & error process does show some kind of "creativity" the human inventors dont expect. Which means that we can look forward to some advanced AI drivers who try to challenge the borders of what is allowed and/or possible on a track. Just like when Senna, Mansell, Lauda and a few others did try something more normal drivers didnt think of Take this example where an early Sophy set a new unofficial virtual laprecord on Nordschleife by violating the track limits. Creative yes but something a human driver (and marchals) would consider un-legal.
The problem with machine-learning pvp opponents is their behaviour and decision making is a black box. You can only improve the algorithm or the training data, but not localised behaviour. Reiza have fine control over ai scripts as as they can manually adjust their parameters, which can be advantageous. I think ML could be useful for optimising AI pit strategies…
Correct. But most people using these artificial neural network for anything serious where the circumstances changes because the environment is dynamic consider this as one of the strong points of this kind of advanced AI. Because how many times have we seen even advanced programs/algoritms fail because the inventors /programmers didnt foresee certain situations. ByTheWay: An analogy is the difference between a child growing up under a strictly authoritarian education (by parents/school) and then another child who have been encouraged to find his/hers own solutions. If you set these children in some new situations where they have to invent their own solutions then I know fully which child I would set my money on
