Official General AI Comments & Discussion Topic

When it comes to multi-class overtaking, I wouldn't say I'm hesitant—just more cautious than in LMU. When you have full damage enabled, you have to be extra careful anyway. In my multi-class races in LMU, slower cars affect the faster ones, and faster cars also affect the slower ones—that's perfectly normal and as it should be. If you can win a race by relying on that, it only means you've set the difficulty too low or you're simply too skilled.

This kind of lapping and overtaking behavior, without proper cooperation and give-and-take, will trigger a lot of yellow flag incidents. When I run multi-class races at Imola in LMU, I get a yellow flag every two laps on average. It's hard for me to finish a single race without getting hit many times… because the AI is just too aggressive

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The Porsche in the two GT3 classes is still a troublemaker. It loses control and spins out on multiple tracks, triggering chain-reaction accidents. From what I remember, at famous circuits like Sebring, Imola, Spa, and others, you can always spot Porsches spinning off… Yes, even with the AI error setting turned off, they still keep making mistakes with great enthusiasm

As much as I’d also love to have that kind of AI, my friend, I have to say—if there really were an AI that fully meets your requirements, your computer would max out after running just two opponents, even on our top‑end hardware. The only thing among all that is actually achievable is the relationship between fuel load and lap times. Over on LMU, just the issue of AI tyre wear alone—I’ve been reporting it for years and no one has paid any attention. At least here, someone is paying attention to the single‑player experience. Whether they’re improving it well or not, at least they’re making an effort

 

Not really. I played racing games with amazing AI in the past and on older hardware than what i have now. And it does NOT have to use the same physics as the player, hell it does not even have to obey the same laws of physics as humans do - it just has to FEEL like it is real for it to work. And that is besides the point of AI being actually high quality in and of itself.

 

I guess you're talking about GTR2 or RaceRoom, right? Actually, I also think feel should come first—it saves a lot of trouble. After all, when I'm driving, I can only focus on a few cars on the screen. As long as their behavior gives you the sense of a real race, that's enough. The invisible pack of cars just needs to run simple scripted lap times, quietly playing the role of Schrödinger's opponents.But the situation I'm considering is not that simple
, in races involving AI, the most important thing is that the lap times are reasonable and consistent with the player's driving state. Transitions between wet and dry track conditions, as well as lap time changes caused by fuel load and tire wear, are all very important variables. If just one variable doesn't match the player's situation, causing a discrepancy in the baseline lap times, the race is ruined. Simply put, you need to feel that both the AI and you are competing on a fair playing field. However, this isn't easy to calibrate with simple scripts or the like. So that leads me to another idea..."

What I'd really like is a more advanced ghost system that records the racing lines from my own laps or from other people's online races, so players can load those ghosts in single-player mode and sort of join online races indirectly. Sure, you lose the fun of close wheel-to-wheel battles, but the race would follow realistic physics and still have plenty of unexpected incidents. You could even run a few races yourself, then put all those ghosts into the same race—isn't that basically an enhanced version of today's time attack mode? Constantly beating your past self—that's pretty fun too.This is the easiest feature to implement—or rather, it's something AMS2 already has right now. The only issue is that currently it only records a single lap under one specific race condition, whereas what we need is to record a full race's worth of ghosts. That should be much easier than tuning AI behavior for countless track and car combinations one by one, right? This is essentially a cycle where players create their own races, then join those races, and then create even more race content. That's right—you'll always have a bunch of realistic and reasonable opponents

 

Hi all, hoping you can help settle something for me…

Using the GT Classic Porsche as a single make (“Identical”) custom race, AI strength 110 at Spa 1000k layout.

Running default gearing I am matching the AI on both acceleration and top end as expected.
If I adjust my gearing to make the gearing a little taller, I then lose out to the AI on acceleration but gain it all back plus a bit extra on the top end.

This is of course what you expect of that setup adjustment.

But, should the AI gearing adjust to match the player?
With the example race setup above, the default gearing is too short and does need adjustment to prevent excessive rev limit bouncing. While Spa 1000k is an extreme circuit, it is also the same story (but not as extreme) for circuits like Kyalami historic, with this car also.

May I ask, what is other people’s experience with this?
Is locked-to-default ratios normal and correct for the AI?

All the best
Andy

 

Recently, another bug affecting long-distance races has been discovered. When using time as the race reference, it often causes some cars to run out of fuel but not pit, leading to retirement, especially on long tracks like Le Mans and the Nürburgring.

 

The preset for the 2019 European Endurance Series . one that comes with the game. I didn't look too closely. The three classes are LMP2, GT3G1, and G2. The race duration is 24 hours. There were retirements in all three classes. I didn't complete the full 24 hours—after about three hours, less than half the cars were still on track.

I ran another test with a 100-lap race, and still a large number of cars retired. There were several reasons. Quite a few cars were flipped over by following cars at some of the chicanes. Also, the Porsche always seems to lose control. It seems the race duration setting doesn't matter much.Because the replay progress bar can't be dragged, I did my best to check the retirements of some cars. They were mostly the same as described above.I found that this type of retirement is closely related to GT3. When I used other car classes, such as Group C or Le Mans Prototypes, there were no frequent retirements.

 

This seems to be occurring in the GTE class as well. During the 24-hour race—running at 4x time acceleration (with authentic tire and fuel consumption)—I observed numerous retirements on both tracks. I suspect this happens particularly following a Full Course Yellow phase. The bad news is that I don't have any video footage; the good news is that I have to drive the 24 hours on the Nordschleife all over again—since, instead of selecting "Replay," I seem to have accidentally hit "Restart" and suddenly found myself back at the very beginning of the race.

 

I'm sorry I didn't save the footage at the time.It'll be a few more days before I can get back to the computer again. During long play sessions, I'm quite certain that GT3 cars not only had massive retirements at Le Mans, but also showed similar behavior on many other tracks like Imola, Spa, Sebring, Daytona, Road Atlanta, etc.This doesn't seem like a track issue, because I often drive other cars on these same tracks and never run into any problems. It's just that the car speeds aren't as high as at Le Mans, so they rarely flip over from a crash — but they do often trigger yellow flags. I haven't played GT4 that much, but I feel they have the same issue as the GT3s. The Porsche AI is a key area that needs adjustment — they are usually the source of incidents. However, I can't say for sure that other car models don't cause accidents.

I also often run mixed-class races with Group C, GT1, LMP1, LMP2, Formula V8, etc. The traffic on track is far more complex than in GT3, yet there are nowhere near as many serious incidents, and even after long runs, very few AI cars retire

GT3, GT4, and GTE all have this issue. Ever since I first bought the game and encountered a bug at Silverstone National, Porsche has always been prone to sliding in corners. Back then, a lot of GT3 cars would slide — it was total chaos. Gradually, they fixed most of them, and now only Porsche remains. When I have time, I want to try a single-make GT race without Porsche to see if there are still any DNF incidents.By the way, you're right. Full-course yellows amplify the severity of accidents and retirements. Even if I turn off yellows and use realistic/default settings for time, fuel, and tire wear, retirements are still unavoidable

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I ran another single-make Le Mans race in the McLaren from GT3, two hours long, and out of 29 cars, none retired. This seems to confirm my expectation: the problem isn't with all GT3 cars, but with a few troublemakers.

 

I spent three nights using the car combination most prone to retirement at Le Mans—GT3, LMDh, and GTE—with the preset conditions of the European Endurance Championship for 2019 or 2025. I ran races lasting over six hours at Imola, Monza, Spa, and other tracks, yet not a single retirement occurred. This shows that the Le Mans circuit itself is the biggest problem. I'm sorry—my previous conclusion was too hasty and my investigation incomplete. As for the reasons for retirements at Le Mans that I've identified, they mainly come down to frequent accidents before the chicane causing rollovers, and another type where you inexplicably retire after pitting. Yeah, this time I'm certain—this conclusion is beyond question.

 

I've just been testing AMS2 again after a long break and this AI behavior "The AMS2 AI rams you from behind too hard and too often on the corners, sticking to you as if you were a magnet." I'm experiencing ALL the time, no matter what combination of AI skill/aggression or car/track combo. I don't recall it ever being this bad though, and I have hundreds of hours on both main and beta versions, as well as many on other sims to compare. It seems to have gone backwards.

Is there any way to dial out the AI rear-ending behavior? Even the slightest tap sends you into a spin, it's very frustrating experience. I'm not seeing it on other sims either (ACC, PMR etc), which makes it more frustrating.

It's two issues in one from my analysis:
. the AI inability to stop rear ending you
. the unrealistic physics when AI taps you in the rear, causing you to instantly spin with no control over it. You can also easily replicate this by doing it to the AI, which was a fun mini game for a while, but now it's just annoying.

I could almost (squeezes fingers) live with the AI tapping me if only it didn't result in an unrealistic fatal spin 99.99% of the time.

The fact I experience it no matter what combination of AI skill/aggression or car/track combo means to me it's a fundamental issue with both AI behavior + the unrealistic physics of what happens with rear end taps.

 

I'd be interested to see what scenario this is happening to you most often?

Like others I have issues with the AI in certain scenarios but getting a straight hit by them from behind has been pretty rare for me.

I experience the issue where once contact is made the AI appear to be magnetic and both of you are 90% likely end up off track and your car seems to have half the weight of the AI car.

I tend to run the AI at around 106-108%, medium aggression and 0.5 on AI mistakes. More than 0.5 on the AI mistakes just seemed to have the AI going off far too often than I consider to be realistic. This ruined good races where I was having a decent battle in the top 5 or 6 and then had 2 or 3 of them randomly spin out.

 

I disagree, a lot of times it feels like the ai suffers choice paralysis and does not commit even with sufficient speed difference. It tends to either follow the car in front/ racing line, and it becomes rather obvious when a car crashes or slows down in front, instead of switching to a secondary line or avoid, they brake hard, even when a lot of space is available.
Due to this I have had quite a few moments where a mass collision occurs as the ai train all get collected in an avoidable crash.

Now these do not happen often, and I know path finding calculations can be taxing on a system, but I feel like this is a point where the player can abuse the mechanic, which reduces immersion.
This is often also due to their increased braking performance they can develop over the player

The AI behind seemingly gets a braking boost, which often leads them to attack on some corners repeatedly.
If they rear end you it's probably because you braked to early for them, try maybe reducing the difficulty, it should´t be that common.
As for the magnet effect, it is annoying and commonly happens when you do not leave enough room due to overshooting the corner, I would recommend being generous with the space given as they tend to want to apex.

Side by side cornering is definitely possible, and ams2 is one of the sims the ai I trust the most to do this, but you cannot force them like online players

 

Can you please please please provide a video ? I keep asking this all the time because i never ever got rammed from behind and i really want to see how people drive if i can replicate it myself.

 

I just can imagine that those people tend to brake "too early". Imo the AI braking capabilities are sometimes alien-like so you have a hard time to keep your position if they're going for a gap.

 

There's no AI more civilized than AMS2's. The issue with them isn't that they ram into you. If you still get hit while racing against them, you should probably look at your own driving. If you play multi-class in LMU, your car could be wrecked in less than half an hour.

AMS2 is the only game where I dare to run multi-class mixed races with full damage on. Yet there are people who keep saying they get rammed. Gentleness is the biggest trait of this AI—it can tolerate many of your mistakes, unless you go way too far

 

I just want to add my 2 cents concerning ramming from behind:
I can't remember the last time I got hit by the AI from behind in AMS 2 and I drive/race quite a lot in AMS 2.

I also play R3E and LMU from time to time and in these two sims I get rammed very often - especially in hard braking zones.

In AMS 2 I use AI at 109-117 strength (depending on car and track) medium-max aggression (depending on car classes) and 3x mistakes. With these settings I always have very clean races.

As @F_B said:
The AI in AMS 2 has alien-like braking skills. It's most significant with cars without ABS. Formula V10 is the most difficult class for me to keep up with AI's braking skills, although I'd say I have found the sweet spot for me without locking up the inner front tyre and without losing to much braking pressure/force. But it's really hard to keep up with them- hence 3x mistakes.

I would like to see settings and videos of the ramming, as well.

 

Dev blog is looking great. I hope more can be done with the "sticky AI" effect whereby an AI car on your outside drags you with it as if you are stuck to it like glue despite it turning away from you. This still, to this day, causes me grief (and race ending/rage quitting issues) quite often.