Official General AI Comments & Discussion Topic

I'd add another thing, which might be the main cause for the AI to be so bunched up together - when they are close behind another car, they suddenly get much faster, by sometimes multiple seconds a lap. They get into an "attack mode" that gives them magical grip and especially braking performance.

 

But it shouldn't matter what the aggression setting is, they should not be making illegal moves.

 

Or if they do, penalties should be applied or behavior such as "yield position" enforced.

 

Man, lots of AI issues? I came to this so as to not have to race online (due to schedule). AI on some other titles don't seem to have these issues.
I hope there are improvements WHENEVER 1.6 comes out.

I really want to have some fun with AI racing...without continuing my iRacing sub

 

Yeah, there are those issues. But if you are aware of them, you can have fun with AI racing, though.
Of course, it would be even more fun if the behaviour of AI would finally be fixed.

 

I have not had any fun racing the the AI for a long time as i can very easily exploit it's faults. Waiting for 1.6 to hopefully fix the laundry list of issues.

 

You can exploit AI's behaviour also in other titles like AC, ACC, Raceroom, LMU and so on. To be honest, they last nice AI if have seen was in Geoff Crammond's games back then.
But yes, there are issues, that's why I wrote this list above.

Edit: I dream of a game where devs take care about the AI BEFORE release. Obviously, that's not state of the art anymore. And I guess it get's tricky within a title which offers such a huge variety of cars.

 

F1 22 and World of Outlaws are the two main games for my AI racing and i have yet to figure out any way to exploit them, because they actually push and defend like i expect from real drivers would.
So my expectations of good AI is on that level, they need to properly defend on corner entry and change langes and block on straights. Only the AI in F1 22 (23 too) and WoO does that from all the games i play. Plus the AI in AMS2 at the moment doesn't even drive side-by-side through corners, which again in the two games i mentioned they do. And i do not care about "physics reasons this and that". The AI needs to get better and i hope 1.6 will fix all the things that i criticized in the past months. Dev update part 2 had shown some hope .
EDIT: Of coruse people disagree when a game has better AI or other features than AMS2. Doesn't change any of the facts that currently AMS2 AI is not good and F1 22/23 blows it out of the water.

 

In my game, the AI try to go side by side through corners all the time, even in the narrowst parts of the track (like the esses down the hill in Bathurst), which would not work in real life without a huge crash because of missing room for two cars. This is because fast cars just do not manage to overtake slow ones before corners on many/most tracks and try to fight their way through by ramming other car in curves.
On tracks with chicanes surrounded by a tyre wall, like Taruma/Chicane, they crash very often by trying to go through side by side.

 

What you are describing is the AI trying to go for an overtake in a suicide manner, like how it is impossible to race the 1991 Monza without there always being a huge pile-up in the opening chicane because one AI driver always spins out another.

What i mean is driving side by side in a reasonable way how majority of track corners actually allow people to do so, yet AI instead decides they only want to go single file through 95% of the track even if it is completely possible (and realistic) to go into a corner next to each other on majority of a track.

Like in the first corner of the Le Mans circuit, AI should not go single file when in real life they go 2 and even 3 wide.

 

I'd also add damage adjustements to AI. As they can retire due to the damage, the colission efects are nowhere near of those suffered by the player

 

Looking forward to the improvments in the 1.6 for the AI...Classic F1 Gen 4, Copse, after 20 second from the green line, half of the grid in front of me spun...IA 120 max Aggressivity...it was like watching synchronized swimming...started 19th, I was 7th after Copse, I just had to go trought the smoke like in days of thunder Lol.

 

Hello! After a billion years I finally got a new wheel so I have been testing it in different sims/conditions. I set up this race in AMS2... Curitiba with F3, 10 laps, dry weather but starting with wet track state. All cars starting with wet tyres and finishing without pitting. First 4 laps are consistent, I keep getting ahead, but after that certain AI cars get an insane speed boost. I am catching the first couple of cars, running 1:19 - 1:20 consistently, P1 and P2 as well. Then cars start coming up from behind running 1:15s with the same tyres. The cars that were P1, P2 in the first few laps keep falling behind but their laptimes are consistent (finishing P7, P9 in the pic below).

Is this normal behaviour? If not (it can't be) is it getting fixed in the next version? Thanks for any info

 

I have had a question for a long time, that is, whether the "stock" drivers that reproduce the real ones (e.g. those of the IMSA GTPs) have defined characteristics by Reiza (and therefore there is no need to intervene by modifying them, but only by changing their name), or are they randomized. Thus the question is: are custom AIs still requested (at least for preset like IMSA)? Thanks.

 

Anyone else experienced invisible cars on track? Tonight i've been racing in Spa in the LMDH class with another slower class on track too. Going up the long straight towards the chicane before the start/finish line I seemed to hit an invisible object. Managed to keep it on track and keep going. Then a few laps later, I had crew chief tell me there was a slower car up ahead (first time Crew Chief had warned me about lapping an upcoming car). Then moments after the warning, with no cars in sight, i hit an invisible object again and was flung into the wall.

 

I tried some Go Kart. Set up a race with all the same karts. But even with the AI set to low performance they went around corners on rails and didn't loose any momentum even though I followed the same line, but my kart slowed down. Even on the straights where the karts have a speed limit and I was doing that limit, they would pass me. How do they get faster karts, when all are supposed to be the same. There was no slip streaming either. This is in the updated 1.6. I even changed the gearing to have more speed/ acceleration. I would beat them out of corners, but the AI would pull away up a hill, so they had more torque. Annoying.

 

I find that difficult to believe. And I've watched a couple of videos and I think it's the same nostelgia that I have for the original Doom shareware. Which is, in my mind, significantly better that it actually objectively was.

That and, perhaps, if you have flaws and shortcomings in other areas - like vehicle dynamics and physics then the AI is going to be easier to do. i.e it is probably a lot easier to get AI that works in Mario Kart because the driving mechanics are so simple the AI only need to be simple to appear to be ok.

Another example, you have a game where you're fighting other people then the AI always appear bad because people are intelligent and AI isn't. Whereas if you create a game with zombies then the AI appear much better because everything they do that's wrong for people is fine for a brain dead zombie. This is why there are so many zombie single player or co-op titles.

We have significantly better physics and car handling now. So to get an AI to drive the car realistically is significantly more difficult. This is true of players too, right? It's harder to get a human to drive around the track in a sim than in a not so sim. To have an AI that is like another human driving is going to require more computing resource than Geoff Crammond had available, so it's not possible they did it and somehow the knowledge quit the industry when Geoff did.

Indeed I found an article with Geoff being interviewed and most of his answers are terse and not that interesting TBH, but here's what he said about modern driving games "I tend to find that other racing games are tricky to control and I don’t spend enough time learning the necessary skills to get much from it" - which I think shows you that he's not intelligent enough to drive let alone his AI

And that's why AI is hard. It was already hard - in the same interview Geoff notes how difficult a problem it was, but now it's harder - and maybe why it looks like it's gone backwards perhaps.

But there's no better AI in the past. What we had were games that didn't show up the AI flaws as much because they were flawed in every other aspect - specifically the driving physics.

 

You have a lot of good points, game development has gotten much more complicated than before, that much is true even to outsiders to how it works like me. But there are much more advanced tools as well, so we would need an opinion of a still active veteran developer on whether that balances it out.

But there are still games old and new that break the mold and become timeless so to say. Take Ultima 7 for example a 1992 game with more interactivity than a lot of modern games.

What made GP4 special IMHO, was how faithfull and immersive it was to a real F1 race, the AI was excellent, though obviously not without its flaws, they were too aggressive and didn't know when to back down, but you could have amazing and more importantly fair and immersive fights with them and just even watching the AI race, the overall flow of the race was just like a real one.

AMS2 IMHO is the closest of the modern sims to give me the same joy that GP4, GPL,GTR2 among others did. It just needs some further AI tuning in their strategies, tire wear,using other compounds and their AI vs AI overtaking and it can definitely surpass those games (mainly GP4, I think it's already better than GTR2 and GPL).

Luckily the game is still gonna be in development for a while yet, so all those AI shortcomings can be fixed/introduced still. Fingers crossed!

 

Ran a bit of Daytona, LMDh, LMP2 Gen 2, GT3 Gen 2.
AI is still not completely there to a point that I feel like PCARS2 was a little better in this scenario (I used to run LMP2 + LMP3 + GTE there a LOT and I think it was one of the best experiences in PCARS2).

Multiclass AI interactions are not the inherent the problem. The problem is that the AI still create those flocks of a couple cars and are unable to pass each other and slow each other down. Looking at their onboards in real time it's evident that they slipstream to the back of the car ahead... and stay there. On the rare occasion when they change their line they usually make a good pass. In practice sessions they are even more likely to get stuck, in that case behind slower class AI as well. All this tested at 108 strength and Max aggression by the way.

I also noticed this while running F1 Ult Gen 2s... I make a mistake, the AI gains on me like crazy in the straight, get behind me.... and slow down to stay there. And I keep my line, don't make any defensive move.

In LMU in contrast the AI freaking barge through the field too aggressively. When I raced AI in GTEs, I was... misplaced a couple of times by lapping LMDhs because they have NO chill at all.

That middle ground between these two behaviors would be the aim...

 

I had this happen at Sebring with the LMDh. A group of 4 of them just stuck together. They would get side by side in two rows and just sit there. You couldn't pass them on the front straight because they would spread out just a little. Then they would hold that side by side through basically the entire first and second sectors. The slower GT traffic is what broke them up eventually but it took a few laps.

I've got strength set at 85 and Low aggression.