Information for Customizing AI drivers in AMS2

For what it's worth, this site might be of interest: F1 Skill Rating

And an article that thinks through your question in the 2018 season: The Best Formula One Driver Might Be A Guy Who Hasn’t Won Since 2013

 

Thanks! - lots of interesting food for thought there... my approach so far probably falls somewhere between those two. I don't think this kind of analysis is likely to 'prove' anything or tell anyone much they didn't know already, but I just find this stuff interesting.

I think the temptation when configuring an AI set might often be to work backwards from real results or lap times (i.e. so you can run a race and get a plausible result), but there are so many variables that are difficult/impossible to measure that make up the personality and style of drivers. If I understand it correctly, I think until we can (hopefully) configure individual teams/cars slots the race and qualifying skill attributes have to basically represent a combination of the pace of the each driver and their respective car. It would be great to be able to configure both in detail (anyone know if this is in the pipeline?) - then some of this info I'm looking at might help add detail to differentiate drivers on talent.

On the complete other end of the 'analysis' scale - I also love the kind of anecdotal stuff you get in autobiographies - i.e. what team bosses or drivers thought of other drivers. Impossible to quantify, but can help add flavour to recreating a field in a sim like this - even if using any such input would probably over-exaggerate any skill/tendency.

For example - I read Eddie Jordan's book lately and it was interesting to see how highly he rated De Cesaris in '91, despite his reputation for crashing. Gachot was quick too, though Jordan talked more about his qualities of being a natural interacting with sponsors. My data (from just four races so far) has De Cesaris at just over 0.3 of a second quicker on average (based on 13 direct comparisons), which I make to be 0.17% quicker on average (though that comes with a health warning as I am not a statistician and I don't really know what I am doing). Might also look at the variation in the gap to see what that looks like in terms of consistency...

Maybe I should just go drive a few laps and stop this lunacy

 

Timo's latest thoughts on the AI:

 

Now that we have customizable AI, as an alternative to using the built in Championship tool, there's the excellent Second Monitor app, which has its own championship creation and management abilities, plus a whole host of other useful stuff. Having the same driver lineup each time makes things really easy.

Home · Wiki · Matus Celko / SecondMonitor · GitLab

 

Super excited to see customizable AI added to the game!

But please forgive my lack of knowledge on file editing and my next comment as I read the first page and basically zoned out after seeing how difficult the process is for someone that has no experience.

Do the devs plans to make the whole process easier via in game sliders or is this just a feature that the majority will depend on others to create files for them ?
Again excuse my ignorance if it was mentioned somewhere in the other 23 pages?

Ex. iRacing, a monkey can set up a ai roster, single class or multi class edit all the names and attributes in 5 mins via in-game sliders without ever leaving the game to edit files.
Click save and done and create another hundred files if you want.

Call me a simpleton, but I'm a firm believer in making features easier will draw more players.

 

There is a plan to add custom AI etc. in game but there's no indication as to when. Editing via external files was included as a stop gap measure.

 

Awesome, thank you for the info!

 

IMHO, 23 pages on this thread needed to discuss something that appears very low in value, impacting very few people (who cares about the name of an AI?) and low dev priority. There are so many easy low-hanging-fruit quality of life enhancements that should be done first (high beams or higher lights, saving camera angle per car, button assignment for turbos, Enter, Escape, etc...)....

UPDATE: I completely misread this thread, I thought the AI customization what just alllowing the change of the AI "names"... and missed the fact that AI "personality/aggressivity/etc..." was also customizable. In that case, having the ability to make changes to AI attributes which could prevent the AI bunching up in a tight corner, would be very useful without having to involve the dev team. Somewhat similar to custom FFB files.... which is great!

 

How this is supposed to be "very low in value" is beyond me.

For a lot of people who do AI racing, having the possibility to race against a real grid with real liveries and real driver characteristics is the most fun you can achieve offline and something you probably can't have in any other sim (to this degree at least) and the fact there are 23 pages of answers tells you that already.

The fact that this needs quiet a bit more work is obvious, as do a lot of other things in AMS2, but that is what we are here for: provide feedback and look for solutions.

 

I had to click 'disagree' on this, though I don't want to seem negative/contrary- I find it really interesting how wildly people's priorities can differ on these things. To me the notion that high beams, etc, could add even a fraction of the value of in-depth customisable AI is completely bonkers.

But we obviously are looking for different experiences, and neither is right/wrong. As the guy above said, 23 pages of discussion suggests this is of value to quite a few!

 

Bit silly to go into a thread that contains many people talking about something they find passionate, to state only a few cares about it. Bit like going to a football match and saying only a few care about football.

Don't like it, stay out. Maybe start a thread about high beam light. I'm sure it will be a blindingly bright conversation.

 

You can be passionate about it as much as I can be not passionate about it... Once the big items are stable, and smaller annoyances are out of the way, perhaps customizing AI might be fun. Having the ability to tweak an XML file to change names and livery for AI that get all jammed up in the first few turns is not going to bring new sales since it wouldn't market itself well. On the other hand, having a good online racing experience, good solid AIs, no stuttering, better sounds, are much more important at this point in time to grab market share.

 

To be more direct about it--the customizable AI over time should *reduce* the amount of time that Reiza developers have to spend on AI--and dealing with the conflicting desires of what AI should be.

Think the AI are too close together? The user can spread them out. Tired of the same people winning all of the time? Reduce their consistency. Without this customization, we instead have 23 pages of back and forth about whether the AI are great or no darn good, with the devs having to respond to the various user complaints.

For most people, custom AI really ends at downloading custom liveries and files from Race Department. But that adds a lot and does help sell copies and DLC. It's simply a better way to sell the game to run against "A. Zanardi" as opposed to "F. Jr." Having a #1 Marlboro car in your rear view has a different feel than a fake livery.

A lot of single player racing is about the immersive experience. AMS2 leads in that area with the graphics, weather, historical content, and user-customizable liveries and AI. SP is a big part of the sim market and will continue to be. With a little more improvement in the AI, AMS2 can really dominate that market.

There's a lot of areas of the game itself that need continued work. But once the AI get to a little bit of a better spot overall (maybe in a release next week?), Reiza can scale back on their work there and let the users take it from there. Devs can then focus on other aspects of the game.

 

In former days, modding was state of the art in racing games, which led to huge communities within some racing simulations for many years (i. e. rfactor, Grand Prix 3 and 4).
In many of the newer titles, modding is either a painful job to do or simply not possible. Thanks to Reiza, that they found a way to let us change at least liveries and AI names/performance without having to be a computer scientist.

 

This is actually a hugely important feature. I upgraded my PC and installed a fresh copy of AMS2 without all the custom drivers, and it's so noticeable when you race against the default AI personalities. The top 3-5 cars drive around in one cluster, all the other AI are half a lap behind in another cluster, and the player is somewhere in no man's land in between them. Maybe Reiza's internal testing races are like this but it's no fun at all, frankly. With custom AI personalities, they tend to spread out much better and you always have someone to race with.

 

Hi all!

I have a stupid question probably, but I hav enot found anything helpful about it yet, so I want to try this way. I have set up a F-V12 championship with my custom drivers just for sh**s and giggles and it is awesome. I've made 19 drivers, assigned them liveries, set everything up and raced. I've tested it with 19 drivers, 17 drivers, 145 drivers an every time the game gave me the drivers I have created (I am now talking about the custom file and then setting the same number of oponents in the game as is number of drivers in the file).

So I wanted to make more custom drivers for different cars and I started to have issues. I have tried to make AI for F-Reiza. Created 15 drivers. Asigned them liveries so they seem to be in pairs as a team mates and created a race with 15 oponents, but in game I have a few drivers with liveries I did not asign, with a random names and brazilian nationalities. I dunno what I'm doing wrong this time. I've took the same file I have used for the F12 series and created one from scratch. Still the same Issue. I'd think that the custom AI overrides the default ones, so they can't bleed among them, but something is fishy it seems. Also none of the custom AI drivers has any special characters in their names.

Anybody has/had the same problem?

Thanks everybody!

 

In my (limited) experience playing around with the AI xml file so far, if a driver is not getting picked up in game (and is therefore replaced by a randomer), it's usually some small typo in the XML file, in particular the driver livery name attribute has to be absolutely identical to the livery name shown on the livery select screen in game. So double check spaces, leading zeros, spelling, etc for any problem cases.

Or maybe it's something else entirely - but worth a look.

 

eSTee3 has created a fantastic tool that does all the hard work for you. you just fill in the values and it will create the xml file. saves an enormous amount of time

 

If you have created just 15 liveries, you should set the number of opponents to 14. Then, the game just loads your individual liveries.

If it does not work, there must be some typos in your xml-files, as "jusk" stated above.

 

@gian the VW GTS cars have exactly the same livery names as the regular
VW cars (plus a couple of extras). How do we distinguish them for Custom AI to work? Are they a different xml class?