Suggestion for AI abilities.

I have had this one tumbling in my mind for some time and I think you guys are the only ones out there that could actually implement it if you and the community found it intriguing.

The problem: Most cars have a qualification time and ability too close to each other.
This is far from unique to Automobilista or Reiza games.

The Result is that if you take your average single player race most drivers will start often behind the bulk of the AI driver by a couple of seconds, then as one relearns the track and gets more familiar with it, the human driver times improve and he/she catches up with the AI.
All too frequently as the lap times improve, I go from last place in both practice or qualification, to blowing by the entire field in first place.
When that happens, I have 3 choices:

1) Race like that, starting in P1. Boring as hell and likely turning into a rout where I barely see any other car
2) Exit the session, increase the AI strength and go at it again. This can get boring and hit and miss.
3) If I raced past the AI in qualification, at the start I pull up and let half the field pass and then go chase the car. OK, but not ideal.

The solution:
As you undoubtedly know, a lot of guys edit the AI files to best reflect Real Life driving abilities of past and present drivers. It's not hard. It's just a bit of a pain to do on all series and all cars, but it's doable.
But it's not for everybody and I am actually not sure it is even possible right now as Reiza has been hiding more and more files for reasons I can certainly guess and agree with.

I am a programmer, so for me it's not difficult to manually make these changes to the AI and use some of my text editing tools to make things easier, but I got thinking that if reflecting actual drivers abilities is possible, then why not change the way the AI drive to create a bigger spread among the cars.

That way regardless of the difficulty level, a SP driver should always have some cars to race against just like in RL. There would be more chances to lap the AI and so forth.

Alternate solution:

Of course, some sort of on board interface to let us adjust individual drivers abilities would be great, even if it used some sort of third party tool.

The way I envision it would be to simply select the car and race as one usually does
Set up the average AI ability
Then have a screen showing a list of AI each with a slider next to it and their ability registered with the average ability.

It would be easy for everybody to use and I don;t think it would be a terribly complex thing to implement. When I took the time to change individual driver abilities in the files, I could have easily written a simple script for those drivers that could have let me change those values in a more effective way.

In fact, while we are at it, why not let us edit the AI files even more, like let us choose our own names.

From my understanding of the Gmotor system, it should not be a monumental task, but I'll bet you you'll end up with the most fun AI in the business. AND an AI that more closely reflects real life races in both the rubber and gasoline racing world and the simracing world.
I never entered a race where the entire field qualified inside 1 or 2 seconds from each other.

I understand there could be issues I am not considering. Even though I know enough to know that if you have a value, you can usually out a variable in there and have the value change based on some condition. The AI driver abilities are based on a number of values. Why not let us either affect them individually or maybe give us something a bit more rough, like a tool to separate the AI field in 3 or 4 groups?
Something like The Heroes, The Journeymen and the Bums. If each group falls within a second of each driver, now we have a qualification board with a nice 6 second spread from P1 to last. Much more difficult to improve so much that one will go from last place to first.

Anyway, I hope you find this intriguing. The few races where I took the time to edit the AI abilities this way were much more interesting and less boring. I think a system like this would be much better than the R3E AI, which is usually a pain to train and often gets it wrong.

Thanks for reading this.

 

I can't see Reiza making wholesale changes to the AI for AMS, could be wrong but I'd imagine they'd simply make them better over time before focusing on Reiza2017, nothing too drastic but enough sorta thing

Talent files go a long way to the Ability you speak of, tweaking them can improve the AI to suit your own needs but don't forget not every racing series has tight compact racing lap after lap. Every Race in every Category can throw up different scenarios, that's the beauty of AI...there is no Right or Wrong way of doing it!

The simple way, which you've already stated, is to find the right balance of Strength (plus Aggression), if that means trial & error so be it but in the end it is worth it. Currently I'm having fun with the SuperV8 @ Cascavel 102% Strength, I can qualify mid pack and have a decent race against them without running away with the Win. Of course everything is subjective, one persons ideal AI Race won't be enough for another person!

I did enough of the RF1 & RF2 AI tweaking and eventual AIW Editing to know what it takes to make the best AI I could, in the end RF2 became so good out the box I rarely need to do any editing of any kind any more. On that note I have trust in Reiza to continue to improve the AMS AI to a point where they're comfortable they can "leave it" before pursuing with Reiza2017, they may surprise us with some additional features as they learn the Code they now have in their possession but don't be discouraged if they don't add in all that you want.

 

I remember having the same discussion with Renato at RD forum: he confirmed that a bigger spread could be obtained by editing the talent files… But that I would have to do it myself: Reiza has to provide ais that works well at various level (basically from 80 to 120% strength, with any aggression level), and different conditions. You are the only one that can further adjust them to your liking like MarcG indicates.
To be honest, it is mainly in qual that the gaps are low, once in race the ais spread quite nicely. And they are damn good! I must admit I did not touch them so far, and I am enjoying my races a lot!

 

Hallo.
This featured would be great.
I user to do this in assetto corsa in custom champ i sprevádza Starting field from 100% to 80%. It is super when you just lesrning track. Or also i am not daily simracer, and when i am a week off the AMS i am not able to catch ai i could a week before when trained more days continuesly.


Please could you specified what files and lines edit exactly to spread ai field in talent files? I am familiar with editing files. Just need know where and what

Thank you

 

I like to try to keep things simple ( don't know how to do it the hard way ) so what I do so that I get a competitive race is to practice till I get a time, sort of equal to the AI's at 100% with low aggression.
I use that car set up for qualifying and race, but increase the AI's to say 105-110% and medium aggression. That way I qualify about midfield and in the race; sometimes I win and sometimes I don't, which is what I want, as winning every race is boring.