I just made a few short 8 minutes races with adaptive AI in DTM'92 on Zandvoort. I thought that AI will get better from race to race actually "adapting" to my driving skill, but in race 4 they are still far to easy to overtake, and once I overtook the whole grid I was able to improve the distance ahead of them very rapidly like my car was from different racing class, and I'm very far from being fast driver. Even if I made serious mistake and crash into barrier or spun and get of the track it was very easy to catch up to them and still gain positions (in race 4 from P16 to P1) I'm uploading replays of races 3 and 4 for reference. http://www.wrzuc.to/f3943264013d5a9f http://www.wrzuc.to/65c5444ef2ea22f3 Also, they sometimes do very stupid things, like slowing down to almost full stop in the middle of a track without reason. Prior to Zandvoort race I've run few other races on Zolder with very similar results. I wanted to switch to adaptive AI as many people recommended this over setting the AI level manually, and I also had a bad experiences with manual AI level from ADAC 2013, where I've been constanly rammed by overly agressive AI (to be honest I'm not skilled enough to master those cars properly so I was not up to the speed of the AI, but still, they kept hitting me over and over without even slightest visible effort made to avoid the crash), so that is why i choose to experiment with adaptive AI. My question is, will it improve in time? How many races will it take? Does the duration or the quantity of the races matter? Does it mater, that in each of those races I was driving different car from the '92 pack?
I can't give you an exact answer to your question, but when I started playing R3E I drove a few races with a longer duration than you with the AI on the difficulty level 100. After that I set the adaptive AI "on", and it worked perfectly - so yes, it will improve if you drive more and maybe longer races.
AAI works the best like this > For each track & cars combo do a Single Race: Practice & Quali. Race should be then challenging for your skill level. Next time you race with the same combo, if you improve your timings, AAI will adapt as well (as long as you keep the Practice and Quali on). Also, if you haven't done it before, delete your old aiadaptation.xml file as with every build AI files gets manipulated and updated C:\Users\XXX\Documents\my games\SimBin\RaceRoom Racing Experience\UserData\Player1
I've deleted aiadaptation.xml prior to those races, but I ran only races without practice and qual. Could this be the reason I can see no improvement in AI driving skill?
No, you only need 3 sessions normally. No practice/qualifying needed. But you need to return to the menu to let the AI .xml update. I use adaptive only and they match my pace, but I delete the .xml file after every update. My experience is that the faster you are, the better the AI are.
If so, then why I was able to overtook the whole grid like they were all driving school students and get from P16 to P1 in both 3th and 4th races in a row on the same track in spite lots of serious mistakes, spins and off track runs I made? The thing that bothers me the most is the way they behave after I overtook them all, you can see it clearly on both replays I uploaded - It's like they all simply gave up and slow down to let me gain half lap distance between us.
It may be your mistakes that are the reason for the slow AI. You need nearly the same pace im your races so the AI can work perfectly.
I'd suggest to both options: do one with practice and quali and then do one (on another track) just three races. I honestly I've reported what @Andi Goodwin posted a while ago on racedepartment forum (and always worked for me after that!) ;-)
if you keep getting invalid laps you may need to slow down a bit as it probably slows the ai down. (am i right its only a theory?)