Official General AI Comments & Discussion Topic

This reminds me of a post I made on here about the AI nearly a year ago - What's up with the AI? , which helps explain where the AI have come from. They used to be benign except when the player's car came close, when individual AI cars would very obviously come to life (or "alert", as I described it in my post of a year ago) and behave erratically, got a bizarre speed boost, often suddenly overtaking numerous other AI cars with no plausible reason, and made kamikaze lunges down the inside of the player's car at corners. This was behaviour which they exhibited only when the player's car came close, never amongst themselves. Whilst work has been done to improve the AI since then, you can still see these traits.

To me, it's like the AI in this Madness engine was designed to be aggressive, arcade fun befitting of simcade types games (Project Cars and Codemasters' Grid types of games), whereas the AI in the ISI engine used for AMS1 was designed for a simulator (rFactor). I'll be impressed if Reiza can get it to a point where it's genuinely convincing to race against.

 

Last month or so AI have taken a fair few steps back imo....

It seems they are frequently not aware Im ahead of them and just try to drive through me which was something I thought we left behind in PC2. That was never a problem before in AMS2.

Also maybe this is new with last Spa version (which is awesome!!! bus stop yay!) but they mount the kerbs way too much as if its part of the asphalt.

 

If they are close together all the cars are almost always to slow or to fast, so i will finish first or last. It makes it hard to find the sweet-spot, and I skip Practice and qualifying because the performance differs from the performance in the race, which makes it even harder to find a good difficulty setting

The Formula classics enter the corner braking harder than i can, driving to slow in the corner and accelerate from the corners faster than i will ever be able to.
I brake earlier and want to keep the corner speed higher, to try keeping up with the AI exiting the corner.
The low corner speed makes it feel like AI is brake testing, and is really frustrating because they accelerate so fast and I need the higher corner speed to keep up with them.

If the skill level is so that the AI has a nice corner speed I need to zigzag in front of them to keep them behind, and once they passed me I will never see them again.

 

I'm going to sound like a broken record, but another fundamental issue with the AI logic is that their lap times are too clock-like, at least apparently (haven't found a tool to keep track of each lap time they make). I do suspect their lap times across a 20 laps race would be something like as follows (supposing a track with lap times around 1:20):

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Btw, the lack of this feature (to be able to see everyone's lap by lap, sector by sector) we had in AMS1 is really sad. Madness engine really sucks when it comes to QoL features as such.

 

There are mismatches in speed on straights versus corners aplenty. This is not brake-checking.

The earlier comments about an AI applying brakes far ahead of where they normally would just after passing the player could be brake-checking...or in this case, just part of the "frenzied" behaviour the AI show when non-robotic AI (i.e., humans) are nearby and don't behave in such a predictable manner.

Also, comments about driving through the player as new...not at all. The AI have been driving through me as though I didn't exist since alpha. For the past month or two, that has been reduced to almost zero. I am sure there are still instances of it happening, especially with mixed classes, or, more commonly, when the player is moving at a speed +/- some percentage different than optimal, which "confuses" the AI at least temporarily. But the awareness of the AI of other cars around them is vastly better now than before.

 

I think Saxohare tried to express the fact that for example the AI in some classes like Classics Gen 2 brake extremely late. Not before, but rather almost in the corner on some tracks. The human player would lock up the tyres in such a case. Then, they always downshift to first gear (you can see that in replays), whereas I would go through it in 2nd or even 3rd, trying not to lose too much speed while navigating my ship, because at too low speeds these little monsters can be very unstable when accelerating again, being much faster in corner. But although the come out of corners from first gear and almost standing still on the appex, they carry a huge amount of speed within a second. So, I am just before upshifting to 3rd or 4th again, pushing hard after going through corner smoother and faster than them without too hard braking, they just come from 1st to 2nd and are enormously fast, though.

 

They actually also brake check you in some places. Every class I tested they brake hard when crossing the s/f line at Curitiba (an old bug in bad rFactor 1/2 mod tracks that somehow has been migrated to AMS2). Makes the AI races there meaningless. It's been like this since the release of the Omega Stock Car.

 

Momentary braking at the start/finish line is an old bug that goes back to rFactor...not an example of AI brake checking the player. The AI paths start and finish at the start/finish line (big surprise!) and if there is the slightest misalignment (or some other issue) it can cause the momentary braking. Totally unrelated to the topic of AI behaving badly.

 

It's not about whether the AI is intelligent enough to brake check me, it's about the illogical places where the AI brakes and how they do what makes me feel like they're doing it.
let's call it illogically irritating braking then.
(These are not the most useful reports, excuse me for that)

 

My two cents on this "driving in groups side by side for a long time" - behaviour.

To avoid that, each car would need to have it's own kind of talent file, like it was in games with the engine used for Rfactor or AMS 1.
So,
1. the Devs would have to give a unique driver name to each car of the game, not just Renato Simioni and his buddies for all classes. Of course fantasy ones for license reasons. Some work, because there are plenty of cars.
2. After having baptized the drivers, each one must get his own talent values in order that the field is more pulled apart during a race and AI does more overtakings instead of accompany each others side by side. A Bunch of work.

But I have no idea if this even would be possible with the Madness engine.

 

"Talent files" in the ISIMotor games weren't exactly a silver bullet either.

They mostly contained a bunch of vague numbers, most of which had absolutely no effect on the AI (depending on which game it was), and no one was really able to tell clearly what effect the numbers had beyond just "increase Speed to make them lap faster". And of course every mod came with talent files that had typos or were just incorrectly created, which meant they never even got used.

I recall many hours wasted with rFactor1 trying to get the AI to have appropriate lap times relative to each other. I was never really able to find out how to solve certain problems, like some AI randomly being really slow in qualifying or never even leaving the pits, or race lap times that were way too volatile (3-5 second differences from lap to lap) making them trivial for the player to catch and pass. And forget about trying to balance an AI race with multiple different makes of cars. Just a nightmare.

If and when the custom championships feature an "AI talent" file, I certainly hope it's more transparent and easier to work with than the talent files of old. For now, I'd be content if their lap times varied by 0.5-1 sec/lap and they actually made the occasional mistake, instead of just lapping side-by-side at quali pace for every single lap of the race.

 

Other than the start/finish line, a known-source exception, where do they illogically brake?

 

That is in development now. You can't sort out basic AI issues when some of these would be masked by the variations in behaviour introduced by the personalities. When you force them to be more robotic, their flaws appear more vividly (as we can all experience and read about here).

 

I did many talent files for mods in AMS 1. No typos, work like a charm.

There were 3 main mistakes which many modders did:
1. They did not link the talent folder in the series file or not correctly. So, the talent files had no effect at all.
2. They gave all the drivers almost the same values. If you want to have the backmarkers some seconds behind as it was in several seasons, you have to use the whole range of values between 1 and 100, not just, let's say 60 and 100 or an even smaller range. Always worked perfectly for me that way. Edit: More than about 4 secs gap was not possible, because you then would need a range from 1 to maybe 150 or more which the game can not handle.
3. Typos

But let's go back to AMS 2, sorry for digressing.

 

I agree with you because my experience with the "Talent Files" in AMS1 was very good, as long as they are well configured.
In particular, I customized the Formula Classic class to reflect real life and, I can say that the results were very close when compared.
The best teams / pilots always at the top of the grid, as well as the worst, always at the end, in addition to these having greater problems with failures, damage and abandonment.
In full races, it was easy to notice the grid gap after 10 or 15 laps of running. In many cases, the winner ended with an advantage of 2 or 3 laps.
It wasn't 100%, but in fact, it made the races much more exciting.

This may not be possible in AMS2, but in the hope that Reiza will develop something similar to make offline racing / champs much more interesting.

 

How do you know - is this speculation or fact? Is it discussed by the devs in the beta forums or something?

I think knowing this aspect of AI individuality is being actively worked on will probably be enough to stop the moaning about it, which has taken over the thread in recent days. I've got to the point where I rarely bother racing against the AI any more as they effectively spoil an otherwise nice time driving around the tracks.

 

Good to know - both about the ongoing AI development and which tracks are best optimised, and also which forum members are involved in the process.