Does the adaptive AI file continually grow even if you are not using adaptive AI? So after a month or so of racing various tracks and cars it should be pretty competitive I would assume.
I found it a good practice to use Instant Replay after a AI crash. More often you will get aware of your own contribution on why the crash happened. Use especially the wingman/follow camera outside and that from different angles, often you have deviated too much from your line so the AI got stuck in the impossibilities of physics (stopping in an instant). This is not hindering your race because if you get out of the Instant Replay you have enough time to continue your race without extra time lost.
Yep, the adaptation system collects your data even if you're not using it but a fixed AI strength. It should be competitive on those tracks you've done a couple races with the same class on and have been putting in consistent laptimes. If you're interested, the aiadaptation.xml file isn't encrypted, you can open it with notepad or alike and see what it does. Needs some scrolling around but you can look for lines which have "float32" in them. The numbers behind those entries are your average laptimes in seconds. After some scrolling it becomes pretty clear how it works.
I got side by side with an AI for 2 sectors straight at zandvoort and didn't crash out.. Maybe it's on your end, or my adaptive ai is being excellent..
Only thing I have noticed racing AI with FR2 series is set to less and up 80% they behave like mad men, set to 95-100% and they really behave and give you a fair fight setting it over 100% and you got your hands full keeping up and they do try to avoid you really good already starting at 95% but the higher you go the more aggressive they get but they do also drive a hole lot better so crashing issue is not more that with a human driver IMO. Think they really put up a fight and that I like a lot.
I had to switch off of Adaptive and have had better races. I find the slower levels cause issues with the cars and it seems its bc the coast is set to low or something on them. they slow a bit and twist all about. That has to be the coast setting?
There is a common suggestion here that my own pace might be part of the problem: let me address this. 1. When I'm not being knocked around by the AI, I am generally leading races at 100% difficulty, else at the very least keeping up with the front runners. 2. Any issue with my pace would not answer why they constantly crash in to each other, too. 3. Even if my pace was off, the AI should not be just blindly crashing. Some more "Intelligence" in the Artificial Intelligence would not go amiss. As has been suggested, on many occasions I have viewed the instant replay and watched from external cameras how the AI have driven in to me. Too many times I have commented to myself, "that just wouldn't happen in real life". Obviously there has to be due consideration that this is a simulation and the AI cannot possibly have the cognitive capacity to react to any given situation as a human being would, but other sims have managed to achieve a very consistent, clean and quick AI, and these qualities should be attainable too in RaceRoom. There has to be a differentiation between pace and aggression: I of course desire them to be fast and present a challenge, but it has to be clean, else there is no point in even starting. Take DTM2015 for example. I have to content, but I'm reluctant to even begin the Championship as I don't trust the AI at all. I am hopefully going to try with wiping to AI file today as suggested previously and see how they behave thereafter. For what it's worth, my intention here is not to bash R3E in any way. I enjoy this title greatly and only ever wish to see it improve.
Quick update: deleted the AI adaption file and took to Spa again, in a GTR, with AI at 100%. First 6-7 starts were a write off. Lunacy at T1, hitting the pit-wall down the straight, etc.. Slowly, they started to behave. When we were eventually running clean laps after a few more restarts, the racing was getting better. In my last run of a 30 minute race, within 20 minutes, I had progressed from 19th to 6th (random grid) and set the fastest lap, before making my own mistake under-braking, sustaining damage and had to retire. It's good to see the AI improve, but this only compounds my concerns regarding a DTM (or any other) Championship. Is there any point in even starting a season when the AI needs 7-8 restarts to behave decently?
It is the most stressful time for the AI to start a race, and i learned that to much eagerness to make up several places at start is at the core of the AI misbehavior. For me it works to have more of a "go with the flow" start and take up some places later in the one on one fights. I truly find the AI of Raceroom (also in GSCE and Rfactor2) the better ones out there, i find Project Cars AI the worst of all.
@Rhino_WJB Do you compete online (MP) regularly ? Do that against strong (worthy) opponents for a certain amount of time and your approach will change significantly...with the result that the so-called "AI -Issues" become almost irrelevant....I promise
You can do a hour practice or more in a single race with as many AI you want and skip the race and they would still learning if you initialy set AI to be adaptive.. But you have to spend a hour or so on every track you want to have championchip on. And you can do that from single race in raceroom menu, AI is the same if they learned a track they are behaving same on that track no matter what experience you drive or champ after that..
Just kinda throwing my 2 cents in here. I think the general consensus when you first start with this sim is pretty much the same. The cars are on ice, and the AI's are jerks. . But for my experience, this is a next generation game. And I had to up my game if I wanted to play. I'm pretty much a single player mode guy. So the ai are really important to me for an immersive experience. It took some time an patience with myself to get up to speed. I personally set the ai to 85% and followed them around the track just to see what their lines were like. I also figured out that the adac ai seemed to be less agreessive so I played that for a while as well. The point is you just need to drop your expectations for yourself and the game until you figure it out. And you will. Now that I've learned the game better and spent some time in it. I can't go back to the old games anymore. they just aren't in the same class. I just had an incredibly intense race with the adaptive ai. In which I qualified 4th dropped all the way back to 10th about 1/4 of the way thru the race because of a slight altercation with the car in p1. And spent the rest of the race working my way back to the front. And finally took p1 at the end of the second to last lap. And had the ai breathing down my neck the entire last lap in a 30 minute. I loved it. But when I first started r3e that slight altercation would havesent me all the way to last place and all the way off track I the gravel, instead of two wheels in the grass. But I wouldn't have had that experience if I hadn't worked at it. It is so worth the effort and time needed to learn this great sim. Don't take it seriously and have some fun while you learn. Its only a game
@Fairman I have competed in organised racing leagues in the past, and I totally agree that MP is always a more rewarding experience, regardless of the sim and level you compete at. I don't do as much online racing as I would like, as my time in the sim is often limited and difficult to plan for, owing to work and other hobby/social commitments. It would be difficult to commit to a regular online season for these reasons, and when joining public lobbies I always expect the worst, so it's really rather important that the AI does not cause any undue frustration, which obviously has been my recent experience in RaceRoom. Through various replies here, I understand now that the AI needs to "learn" a track before they start to behave. I really don't see why they cannot do the learning in the Development office before they reach the consumer, but then again I'm not a programmer: just going by my experience with countless other racing sims over that past 10+ years. One point of note though that I do think is important that also keeps coming up, this being the notion of an "adaptive AI". This seems more like a feature you would find in casual games, not something I would expect to see in a simulation. Never in any regular motorsport competition would the field adapt their pace to suit you as an individual! The entire point of racing with AI at 100%+ is to test yourself as a competitor. Slower than the AI? Find where you are slower and push to improve! Having the field modulate to your own pace just doesn't make any sense to me, and would give Player 1 little incentive to improve at all. I would much rather finish 10th in a field of AI at 100%, than 1st against AI that might be set somewhere between 60-90%, dependant on my own pace on any given track. For casual players, sure, sounds like a reasonable feature, but if you're looking for realism (which obviously I am) I don't see how an AI field could ever be set to a modulating pace.
And what should that "realistic" AI be based on? What does 100 % mean in terms of an AI? The point is that every player can always have a challenging AI at any point and any skill level. Let me invert your question. Faster than the AI? What do you do, go and find another, more challenging game/sim? From my pov there's nothing worse than a game that doesn't pose a challenge (anymore), which will never happen with this adaptive AI. Not sure how closely you've been following the development of Raceroom, but initially there were no fixed AI levels at all, only adaptive. Fixed values were added later on.
I would assume 100% would be based on actual cars, driven by actual drivers, on the actual track. DTM series for instance: I would expect the lap times in R3E to mirror very closely the lap times recorded in the real world series, at 100%.
Which should be unbeatable? Don't quite get your point, sorry. There's all sorts of inaccuracies and limitations in a virtual recreation. No simulation can even remotely mimic all influences happening in and around a race car. Without all those influences and with the much more "perfect" conditions in a sim (let aside all the physical aspects but just the psychological aspect of it not being real, not being dangerous, you being able to push the car to its limit at every inch of the track without fear of repercussions), it is quite easy to beat those rl laptimes in a sim, even if it is very true to life. Which in my mind raises the same question again, what if/once you're faster than that perfect AI?
Is that not what being able to adjust the AI level over 100% is for? If set to 100% and you are faster than the AI for the valid reasons you mention, then having the facility to adjust to an artificially quick pace is a perfectly reasonable thing. Initially, to compete with AI at 100% should be the target. With all those real life considerations in our favour as simulation drivers, I would expect that to be attainable, yet still pose a very significant challenge. We're getting into the detail of how we each believe AI should manage their pace, and how that translates to both an enjoyable and challenging experience for the user. This is a point separate from my initial observation, being that AI are constantly too aggressive and often causing situations on the track that simply would not, and should not, occur in real life. The AI pace is somewhat secondary to this point: the pace is adjustable by the difficulty % which is fine and not in question (Easy 60%, Medium 80%, Hard 100%, Alien 120%, for example), but the amount of aggression and seemingly mindless contact is a constant until they "learn" the track limits. More should be done to ensure a clean drive from the AI, in my opinion.
Yea, right. I was only commenting on that one point you made about adaptive AI. Just a closing thought on that: What you mentioned just now, using an "artificially" acellerated AI, isn't really realistic then too, is it? And it is basically what the adaptive AI does for you instead of you chosing that level yourself. That's all it is/does really. You don't have to adjust the AI level yourself, the game does it, and it does it more accurately (it doesn't switch between 100 or 103 but can calculate your personal level with any class on any track, which might be 98.6294135 (I think it calculates to the 7th decimal)). Maybe you're different, but I know many people, including myself, who are stronger on some tracks and weaker on others and adaptive spares me from adjusting the AI level all the time but simply does it for me. If you reject that idea you don't have to use adaptive AI, it doesn't offer anything more in terms of AI "intelligence" or "logic" over the fixed values apart from the average AI driver being closer to your personal level of performance than fixed AI can provide. Agression and other aspects are still WIP and being worked on constantly.
This is the point I don't understand about adaptive AI. Why would you want to adjust the AI down to your pace? Surely the objective then is to find the time and get faster on your weaker combinations, not pull the AI pace back. I am very much the same, some tracks I know better than others, but that fuels the drive to improve. If the AI adjusts down to my pace, where is the incentive to get better? There has to be more satisfaction in finally winning on a circuit that you struggled to compete on previously.
if you just wanna have quick good race with well balanced grid ... this is one way how to get it ... some AI will be faster than you, some slower .. personally I prefer to have AI set so its laptimes are bit faster than mine (in race I`m usualy faster than in qually) but for chill out car testing races adaptive AI is good