Official General AI Comments & Discussion Topic

Does the AI use Push to Pass P2P in races?
I was racing a Copa Montana championship with 9 races with versus AI and didn't notice acceleration and speed differences in AI cars through the race laps.

 

I've seen the P2P going down when I spectate the cockpit of AI so I'd assume so. On the monza straight I was having AI fly past me if I didn't use the boost button on the stock cars.

 

When driving Formula Ultimate Gen2 in qualifying AI cars will emerge from the pits and stay on the racing line while I am on a hot lap. They need to move to the side and it would be great if there were animations of marshals waving blue flags at the same time.

 

The AI in the ARC Camaro seem to change gear far too late in the rev band. They tend to hang onto the revs, and lose lots of time as the acceleration drops off, before changing up. It ends up with the player being able to breeze past them on the straights if they change gear up well before the rev limiter.

 

There is one thing with the AI globally on all tracks that I've seen.

When an AI outbreaks on the inside line, and it it happens beautifully often which I love, if they clear your car, boom, they move under breaking onto the racing line right in front of you. And often they've already slowed down enough to make the corner but you haven't, so you'll plow into them. Very similar to what Max did to Ricciardo at Baku.

So changing lanes in the breaking zone. Hopefully that can be something the engine allows to be fixed. If anyone can do it it's you Reiza! Thank you as always.

 

Agreed, although much of the time the problem is simply that the AI can brake better/shorter than the player, it would be great if the AI could assess how close an opponent is and not move over until later in the braking zone or in the corner itself, depending if either is safe, rather than assuming the car behind is capable of equal braking (and reaction time).

 

Group C opponents at Le Mans don't seem to be running qualifying boost. Was 5th or 6th in practice on 120% but then suddenly on pole by 3-4 seconds in quali.

 

What does the AI do that causes it to lose every race because of its bad pitstop?
As an example, I'm doing a 60-minute race in Le Mans with the classic GT1 cars. So the fuel isn't enough and you have to refuel with around 30 liters to go to the pit stop. While I'm even changing the tires (which isn't necessary at all), the AI needs about 30 seconds longer in the pits than me and therefore has no chance. I've seen this happen a lot, what do you do about it?

 

The only thing I can think of is that you start with a full tank of fuel and then add only the 30 liters that you need, while the AI always calculates how much fuel they will need for the entire race and roughly divide it in half. So they might be putting a lot more than 30 liters in their pitstop, and starting with far less fuel. Also, some 5-10 seconds of that is due to the way the AI drives inside the pits, they are very slow there.

 

• Car: Lotus 49 / Track used: Brands Hatch

• AI Strength setting: 78

• AI Aggression setting: medium

• Weather when the issue was observed: Medium Cloud
  Many, many incidents.
  1) First off, AI cars cant leave the pits in a practice session:
  
  
  2) Now onto the race. AI driver is spun out, which is okay. But then if forgets how to return to the track:
  
  
  3) AI car touches the rear wheel of another car and it just...jumps:
  
  
  4) Bad attempt at a overtake creates a traffic jam (this also happened in other sessions and different corners with the same setup):
  

 

For the most part I think the AI is fantastic, the only thing that bothers me is that in races they run unrealistically close nose to tail, which a) looks weird, and b) means if you have just 1 spin even quite far into the race, you can go from top 5 to last in the 10 seconds or so it takes to recover the car.
In a real race (and online), the field is always much more spread out because even if their 1 lap times are comparable, people make mistakes, and even small ones add up. AC content manager has solved this issue by introducing a skill spread which works great.

Another idea that doesn't sound too hard to implement would be to add a small randomiser on the brake point of the AI, so sometimes they're a tad early or late and take a worse line, creating or reducing the gap to the car in front. This randomiser could be big for the 'less skilled' AI and small for the 'more skilled ones' which would end up with the more skilled ones pulling away.

Perhaps both these ideas are unfeasible/impractical but I'd love to see something being done about this to make races feel more realistic.

edit: just googled that it's possible to edit AI personality settings,cool! Will hopefully solve this issue for me if I can make the skill spread greater in the field

 

I think the only major thing AMS2 AI does better than the AI of other sims is they rarely crash into you.

As I expect many disagrees with this post - which is absolutely fine -, I would like to know from those who disagree what else besides not crashing into you that makes AMS2 AI great.

 

I think the recent video from overtakegg summed up the AI of most modern sims pretty well, none is horrible but none really stands out heads and shoulder above the rest.

I think AMS2 does one of the most important features of an AI extremely well, the wheel to wheel against the player, you can have some extremely satisfying and immersive battles against them and seeing them do mistakes sometimes due to the pressure you put them, reminds me of GP4. I would say only the F1 games are better in that regard (at least from F12018 to 2023, haven't played 24 yet). I am actually playing F12018 and its incredibly cool how the AI can outbreak themselves when trying to overtake you or lose it when under pressure in a very realistic and unscripted way. AMS2 is similar but the mistakes are much more scripted of which I have no issues, better to be scripted than the AI be soulless robots trudging along (GT7&ACC) or blind maniacs (AC).

This doesn't happen with the vanilla content as much, but with some work with the custom AI you can make races be very dynamic and unpredictable, so no 2 races will play out the same. Being able to customize the AI personalities is one feature than only Iracing has as well, and its much more simple to do in AMS2 (though not as detailed as Iracing).

Overall they need some work still and I think some of its shortcomings might never be fully fixed unfortunately, like the inability of the AI to do outbraking overtakes . But they are still working on improving it on almost all updates they bring, so there is still hope that Reiza is able to fix their worst shortcomings like their consistency around some circuits, their pace in the wet, race strategies (like being able to use different tire compounds) and making the overall spread of the field more realistic in the open wheelers specially (so they are not butt sniffing each other so much) and finally improving their overall AI vs AI behavior which is lacking compared to the AI vs player.

So yeah, it might seem like the game has more shortcomings than strengths but its because I have played it so much that I know most of them, and it speaks volumes to the potential it has that despite their shortcomings I really enjoy driving against them. Also if I played other sims as much, I am sure I could point out many flaws, the F1 games as good as the AI is have their share of issues as well, heck even GP4 had the AI being very erratic and overaggressive sometimes.

So enough of the wall of text, lets just hope the potential can be mostly fulfilled by the time the development of the game ends.

 

I fully agree with you. Never understand the big praising of the AMS2 AI. They are mostly fast and competitive but fighting, defending/blocking and overtaking is not very pronounced.

RF2 AI does in this case a much much better job. But RF2, the only one i compare as i dont use other sims, has the issue, as you described; that the AI is crashing/hitting/punting you to often, ruining your race. Probably a matter of to high aggression.

This could be the main problem of making a good AI. It should be aggressive and at the same time careful against other cars. That seems to be the big challenge.

 

I think for me there's one glaring omission from AMS2 that would make racing against AI just that little bit better; An AI Learning Tool.

I used to drive RF2 and spent hundreds and hundreds of hours against the AI, using the AI Learning Tools within that sim opened up the AI and simply created better racing. Once you got used to them in game they were quick to understand and within minutes you'd have AI driving better lines through corners and all that was before you could edit the Lines yourselves in Dev Mode (which i also did a lot of), something I loved doing and I created many "better" AIW files for tracks and countless AI files for cars.

With AMS2 however there's a reliance on Reiza to tweak lines individually and wait for each update to see of there's something in the release notes, as it stands as much as they tweak lines and adjust parameters themselves there's still a sense of "I just need a little bit more" from certain AI on certain tracks. If there was a quick Learning Tool as found in RF2 that would go a long way, no more would the G40Cup cars be far too quick around Druids and far too slow through Westfield at Brands Hatch whilst the rest of the track they're bang brilliant to race against.

However of course the AI are improving each update and are a far cry from what they were like in the early days, Reiza have done an incredible job but there is still some way to go. My aforementioned "niggles" however are still there in the latest public release and they include AI Dropping Off far too quickly when you pass them, "magnetic contact" whereby I kinda get stuck against an AI during contact and the wild deviations on movement when you get too close so it's far too easy to "force" them off line.

Aside those niggles and other minor issues they're great fun, I'm using the (brilliant) AI Editing Tool as found on Overtake/RD and have made the racing that much better with the help of adjusting individual parameters to closely match the G40Cup AI, some of the battles I've had have been fantastic - but I just want that little bit more control and possibilities to edit the actual Racing Lines myself, racing against the AI is quite a personal thing and AMS2 needs a more personal touch.

 

Completely agree, if AI lines and more parameters were opened up to the community it would improve the AI in AMS2 out of sight. There is a lot of content for this game now, lots of tracks with a lot of layouts, and the AI is at a point where it's good enough to tap into the community and take a bit of the load off Reiza.

 

An AIW editor like in RF2 with the possibility to patch the AIW of official tracks would be also my dream.

 

Gonna join the choir on this one. Although... if this game is based on the madness engine, which in turn is based on the gmotor engine, shouldn't there be an AI calibration tool already?

 

Can somebody clear a doubt for me? The help toolbox states that the AI can customize their setup to adapt if the difficulty goes above 80%. So, do they? I'm just very curious about this