Official General AI Comments & Discussion Topic

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I'm struggling more with strange/bad AI behaviour, in races and practices.

Most recently; at Le Mans, multi-class with P1g2, P3, Ginetta Supers... P1s just staying right behind a car, lifting off constantly (which also deactivates their DRS every time leading to bigger gaps to player than normal).. just more cars narrowly in line, grouping occasionally, but backing out of every overtake if they aren't at least halfway alongside, getting right behind the bumper instead. More obvious in a practice too when everyone is mixed up from the start.

It does seem noticeably worse with multi-class, but also generally whenever the AI isn't directly involved with the player, but with other AI. I would say it's gotten worse recently.

(AI on medium aggression. No car/track mods, so no altered files, apart from paints/custom AI drivers on some cars, have noticed this behaviour across all recently. 105ish difficulty if that makes any difference)

 

Yep, they definitely regressed on their ability to overtake on the last update. They are much better at not going off track and put dirt on the road, but they hesitate even more than before now.

As an example, try Adelaide 88 with a Formula car, they can be in front of the car on the left before the hairpin after the long straight and they just hammer the brakes and back off, even at high aggression.

 

Agree with the above. On a race in Goiania with P1g2, GT3 and GT4, AI set to 109 medium aggression, I've seen quite a few times the P1 getting stuck behind GT3 and GT4, mostly on slow corners like T3 and T5 and T6 where there was definitely enough space to go around (which in fact is what I did and gained position). The AI controlled P1's where braking too early before a turn, then getting stuck behind the slower classes all the way around it.

And just now on a race in Cascavel with Stock Car Pro Series 2023, the AI had way too much grip around first and last turn, and it seemed like they didn't experience much tyre degradation. Difficulty was set to 105, medium aggression, dry, medium rubbered track, light cloud.

 

• Car / Track used: Formula USA Gen 2 / Watkins Glen GP

• AI Strength setting: 106

• AI Aggression setting: low

• Weather when the issue was observed: Clear

 

I guess it depends on the track as on Bathurst even with low aggression the AI is always divebombing me from way behind in every single corner.

It's also strange how the AI generally has an easier time going through traffic when it's actively trying to overtake the player. They will follow me through gaps they usually wouldn't go for.

 

Their hesitation issue is not against the player, they are actually pretty good. Its between themselves, where they are very hesitant to pass each other and love to sniff each other butts like dogs .

I still stand by my opinion that the AI has a performance boost when within 1 second or so off each other and the player, that boost in turn allows much slower cars to keep up and you end up with these very unrealistic bumper to bumper butt sniffing packs between the AI. Just today I was doing a RetroG1 race at Buenos Aires with custom AI at 112% difficulty and high aggression. Richard Robarts with a .64 race skill was doing 1:55 laps, as soon as Reutemann with a .94 race skill (who spun and was out of place) passed Robarts, he suddenly did 1:53.9 matching Carlos race pace, he stayed close to Carlos for some 5 or so laps until he made a mistake and Carlos pulled a 2 second gap, then he went back to the 1:55's. So they gain up to a second in pace when within that boost threshold! Happened with a couple of other drivers in the race as well.

They really need to do something to mitigate that issue, as good and dynamic as the AI is in AMS2, its the only game where they stay glued to each other for a full race length on a road course as if it was the Daytona 500.

 

I’ve just completed a race at Barcelona between Lmdh and Gen2 GT3 and they seem to be struggling to pass the GT3 field at times.
It’s like they get right up behind them with their nose under the rear bumper and lose all momentum and ride the brakes. They drive on the grass on the outside on the run down to turn 10 also.
Definitely feels like they have gone slightly backwards recently unfortunately,
100 ai , medium aggression.
I’ll add to this that I’d previously completed a race at Imola in Lmdh and had a dreadful race because of my own mistakes. Left me fighting for p8 to the final turn and managing my fuel down to the very last lap as I miscalculated it.
Coming out the final turn I had a BMW on my tail and turned the engine mode to rich and and ers to qually and booted it.
Crossed the line 0.2 ahead and conked out before turn 1 as the fuel had gone.
Absolutely edge of my seat stuff and all for p8.

 

Would be a nice add on if we could edit the engine power within the custom AI file with the usual values between 0 and 1.
Right now, we can edit the driver's abilities, but if a fast and a slow one have exactly the same car, they have similar speed on straights because of their engine power, the faster guy is just faster through corners. This has the effect (as far as I could see) that the slow guy runs same speed on straights, but then crawls in front of faster one through corners, just to push away on next straight again. Therefore, a fast AI often gets held up by slower drivers in qualifying for several laps.
But I have to confess that I have no idea if the madness engine is capable of letting players edit the engine power.

 

I have 4 major gripes with the current AI, and they could all be mitigated massively with 1 simple fix:

1: During quali, slow cars should move *way* out of the way on in/out laps. Currently, they block much faster AI cars. I just had AI-powered Senna qualify 10th, because he kept being stuck behind slow cars, during a 1 hour session. Happens all the time.
2: During quali, faster cars should be smarter to create a gap before starting fast lap - see above issue.
3: After I lap a blue-flagged, much slower car, which I've just caught by 5 seconds per lap, it immediately goes into hyper-aggresive attack mode and tries to take the place back. Don't do that...
4: Very slow AI cars are generally very fast on straights (just as fast as me), ultra slow on corner, often on the apex, making lapping them hard.

I can understand how these issues are hard to magically fix, across all cars, tracks etc. However, implement this one change to Custom AI support, and they would all (almost) go away completely:

Custom AI should support 0.0-1.0 weighting for ballast / BoP / hp / torque (any one of the four would do), so that we can make the backmarkers slow on straights/acceleration, like they would be in real life.

If AI already takes weight from fuel into consideration when setting a pace, it shouldn't be hard to add a constant to that? This has been suggested before. Pretty please?

PS: This is an amazing title, I love the historic content and racing against the AI, reliving the 90s. It's an 8/10 for me, please make it 10/10!

 

I think I read Renato wrote something like that might be on the cards for later. That will definitely help with the pack racing a bit, but if they still get that "boost" when within 1 second, we will still get that 2 by 2 or 3 by 3 racing between slower and faster cars on tracks that dont have very long straights.

 

The "boost" needs to go asap, especially for lapped cars. I've had stupid race ending incidents with lapped traffic getting the "boost" and attempting to unlap themselves immediately. Frustrating is a massive understatement. This "boost" for the AI behind the player has been around since PC1/2.

 

Overall the AI behaves great, it's competitive, it's clean, it's the best AI I've ever raced with.
But it has a problem and that is that it fails to convey the excitement that an online race has because they don't make mistakes.
In an online race you have the emotion that you can go 10, some cars go off and you can put on 5, go off the track and get last, come back because other cars go off again, etc...
In a race with ams2 no one goes out, and if you get out you can't catch them anymore because they all go together and don't make any mistakes.
In short, it lacks the emotion that you make mistakes but so do others and you have the opportunity to come back.

 

I can disagree on two things right there - overal quality of the AI is meh at best because i said it before, they do not defend the inside of the corner and will always give the player more room than they deserve. The second thing i disagree is that they do not make mistakes, because they actually do them but the problem is they don't do enough mistakes or diviate enough from an ideal line. There needs to be an in-game slider or similar setting to the AI aggression that dictates "AI mistake frequency" where we can have it much higher than what is currently happening.

 

I totally agree that AI is missing a parameter as you say of error frequency. That could be a percentage or a rookie, amateur or pro ranking. This would add excitement and realism to a race against AI

 

The AI do make mistakes, however as with many of their behaviors it can vary from class to class and even tracks (they make less mistakes in close walls circuits like Monaco).

You can increase their mistakes probabilities slightly by using a custom AI file. Thanks to John Ellis Names and Luxmundis custom AI driver utility it's extremely easy to do so. But I agree with Tom in that it would be better to have an in game slider for that.

 

I did MANY tests with various cars having the AI mistakes set to the lowest possible number, which should result in the highest chance of them making mistakes - it made basically no difference and the AI still does mistakes too infrequently. It is like the numbers make no difference as to how often AI incidents occur.

 

Will have to do some testing myself, but maybe that parameter has been disabled for the time being as well, like the wet skill, stamina and tire management.

 

• Car / Track used: Porsche 911 RSR 74 / Jerez Historic 1988

• AI Strength setting: 110

• AI Aggression setting: medium

• Weather when the issue was observed: Clear

 

Outlap Behaviour in Qualifying:
On the outlap/inlap, AI are racing cars which are on their fast lap like hell on straights and then go extremely slow through corners by blocking the line. On next straight, they start fighting fast cars again. Caused by this behaviour, the AI is building trains in qualifying.
Would be nice if they let fast cars pass on straights without racing them.