Forza Monthly livestream July 17

Forza Motorsport Forza Motorsport (2023) Discussion
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My big concern right now is that it’s not going to be anywhere near as dynamic as Turn 10’s claiming it will be. Really, Chris spent a lot of time talking about the AI today and then didn’t show much of it off, if at all. That’s a red flag. That says to me that whatever they were trying to do, they missed, and they’re hoping that the other parts of the game dazzle enough to distract until they can figure out why they missed.

I’m also becoming less convinced about their tire model. Turn 10 keeps using the same buzzwords, but limiting compound changes to just racing-spec tires is not good. Assigning arbitrary tire life numbers to those compounds is even worse. DOT-approved track tires last longer than four laps, and those can often have treads meant for street use. Slicks are going to have a lot longer life than four laps. They’re also not “qualifying” tires, as Chris felt it was necessary to point out; if that was the case, no one in F1 or WEC or IndyCar or IMSA would ever use them in a race. But they do, because that’s what individual team strategies can call for from time to time.

This game is sounding less like a simcade and more like what a Need for Speed player thinks a simcade is.

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Chris mentioned the lift off torque spin has been toned down from FM7. I’m playing fm7 atm and that does sound very nice.

Some of what he said has me a bit disappointed. Still leaning towards accessible but with no options to go hardcore. The tyre heat for eg. If I want to light up the rears, let me deal with it, don’t tone down the effect.

Or better yet, let the tyre burst. One of the grid games on 360 would burst the tyres if you lit them up enough.

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I agree with you. The Italian 4 should be a literal dlc, which is a car pack, which should be free, just like Mitsubishi DLC in FH4.

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The new game’s AI being 13 seconds faster than FM7’s AI on unbeatable is a red flag, and literally showing how the tire model is improved over the old game is buzzwords…

Reading this thread can give someone an aneurism.

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“The Soft compound has the most grip, but wear out the fastest making it ideal for a Qualifying tire”. I didn’t catch the livestream but I saw this in the official post, I was under the impression the game wouldn’t feature qualifying??

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The context within the conversation on stream was as an example as to when that type of tire would be used in racing in real life.

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Ah ok cheers, almost got my hopes up for a moment there…

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Multiplayer will have quali.

To be discussed in future Forza monthly

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That’s neat for the MP players. I mostly prefer to play offline, was hoping they’d had a rethink about their challenge the grid feature. I really enjoy quali in the F1 games

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Make the demonstrations make sense. Particularly the Laguna Seca one. That was a lot of words to say, “Oh, by the way, the environment team finally figured out how to model all of the curbs correctly.” And even then, he described it wrong, because in most circumstances, it’s not the red-and-white curbs you have to really worry about upsetting the car - it’s the red (in FM7) and yellow (in 2023) apex curbs you have to fear, and in FM7, those were largely inconsequential to the point where they had to put in the various unrealistic track objects to prevent corner-cutting. And then of course there are the aforementioned concerns about the compounds and their unrealistic lifespans.

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I don’t see where any of what you wrote is revelant to what was displayed and discussed in the demonstration. You may as well be arguing from your feelings, because you certainly are materializing non topics out of the either.

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42

Gotta say I was really happy with what Chris showed and discussed today.

I love that they’re narrowing their focus to the core of FM, asphalt circuit racing and confirmed there will be no more oddball cars (limos, pickups, SUV etc). Drag racing in FM7 was kinda cool and he left the door open for it and drifting in future updates, but personally neither matter much to me.

The improvements in AI mentioned are definitely positive in terms of their ability to drive clean, fast laps. I do wish they’d retained some of the Drivertar inputs from previous games but softened them so they don’t become rammers, but I guess they figure this is a better direction to take.

Still much more to be seen though in terms of how AI races, in terms of attacking, battling and defending.

In terms of tyres and physics, gotta say I loved that session as it finally put some meat on the “48x” bones. You could clearly see the higher physics refresh rate producing smoother and better reactions of the tyre/suspension over surfaces and it’s great that curbs are now fully modelled rather than being generic canned effects. It does add to my ability to believe there is meat on the bones behind their other buzzword statements.

Glad throttle lift oversteer has been reworked. I hope they have also fixed on throttle oversteer as well.

Finally, great to see an onboard lap with a wheel. Not only is Kyalami looking absolutely spectacular, but it was great to hear how much work they’ve been putting in to wheels via the G920 and other wheel systems. As a wheel user, that was great news and I’m really looking forward to seeing more detail on this topic.

Does seem that the audio is a bit limited though. Not much in terms of gearbox/drivetrain audio unfortunately that are normally pretty prevalent in the Porsche.

With only a few months to go, I guess we’re only going to get a few more of these so hopefully they cover more in the next ones. But I’m psyched for this to come out already!

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I liked how he mentioned oversteer and throttle and stuff is being looked at. I have some really strange behavior in FM7 regarding how car could easily be out of control, like no street car would.

Since it was to talk about AI, I would liked to know how it behaves with many competitors on track. With other cars around you cannot just pick best line and stuff.

  • how does AI behave when about to overtake you doing a turn
  • who gets priority, the just in front, or should I leave room
  • will the right vehicle get cancelled lap time if AI drives into you or touch you
  • is there a setting for AI agressiveness too

I got no useful information for AI presentation, I must say.

And felt Chris was surprised on the AI mistake question like he forgot about it. I assume they had some pre-talk what to raise or not.

  • it will happend naturally, what does that mean?
  • nothing was programmed by probability or so he meant

Presentation of tire model was quite neat.

  • you could see deformation in different parts of tire
  • I hope this goes for entire track, not only kerbs

It’s just 2 more Forza Monthly before release, so a bit thin this one. A lot of talk by Chris saying very little.

  • and him driving a lap, I saw nothing on tire indicators cold/warm or anything
  • same smallish size as FM7
  • I want bigger ones like ACC and PC2 has

I get the feeling there are many things missing, but they have set release date now and this is it. Many updates the rest of year, I think.

  • I don’t think I will be early adopter
  • wait for some things to be ironed out first, christmas maybe

And what about built in telemetry?

  • not even listed of upcoming things as I could see

Overall I am exited though. Mostly presentation that could be better.

  • better scripted presentation and not so much talk saying so little
  • Chris was to show a video, and talked for 10 minutes first?
  • bit like Chris is tired of making these presentations

It will be great game and last many years with new things coming all the time.

  • I will be on them as they come, but no rush for release
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Yeah some good points here.

In a game which heavily features tuning there needs to be some telemetry or live information. It’s hard to know what pressures to set when you don’t know what the operating pressures/temperatures are (hopefully this is included in the setup menu descriptions) and don’t have any data to see what your car is doing.

The live, in-game telemetry from FM7 for example had good data, just that trying to observe it and think about it whilst trying to hotlap isn’t a good idea. The basic HUD seen so far doesn’t show us much useful info.

We’ve seen some AI racing behaviour in the gameplay from the June monthly, though was very limited and short.

Given there isn’t much time left, I do hope we see some bigger presentations before the release date.

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No way. The new FM was a far cleaner,smoother and optimised lap.

FM7 was jerky and awkward.

FM7 right after it goes under the bridge it shifts to 6th for an instant before shifting all the way down to first for an instant and then back up to 2nd.

All through the next series of turns the shifting is inconsistent, it is constantly dabbing throttle mid corner, all the inputs are super janky leading to all that body movement you speak of.

The new version is clean and smooth. There is none of that janky inputs and thus it looks smooth and is way faster.

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Well, maybe you’ll see it differently when you see it in proper 4k, sure didn’t give me that impression.

The statement he gave on driver errors was that there aren’t canned events where based on some modelled probability cars will randomly spin out or stuff up in specific programmed ways.

Rather, the AI isn’t perfect and will make errors in terms of running wide or braking late for example, not because a probability model made them do it randomly.

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I dont see how that could be true though. The ai has to be programmed one way or the other, it has to be told what parameters to follow in X amount of situations. Now obviously adding a human in the mix can disrupt the ai’s normal behavior but for him to say they naturally make mistakes just randomly based on miscalculation is a bit unbelievable. The only mistakes ai can make are the ones they are taught to. Knowing turn 10 and their mastery of stretching the truth i could see them making a program that then programs the ai to do whatever and since a person didnt physically type in these parameters they can say “we didnt program the ai”. They programmed a program that programs the ai.

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So, I’m running a little experiment right now with regards to that.

Loaded up Motorsport 7 and got into the same #70 Mazda B12/80 P2 prototype that he was running in both dev builds. Took it to Maple Valley Full Circuit and turned a few solo laps. Second lap after getting my bearings back, I ran a 1:19.7. Not my fastest. There’s certainly faster. But this isn’t about me. It’s about the AI, right?

Same track, 5-lap race. I’m on lap 4 and just binned it into the wall, racing 10 Unbeatable AI. I’ve run a best lap of 1:21.203. All of the AI are within three seconds of my time, with the fastest one being a 1:23.759.

Restart race. This time, I’ve switched to the Porsche RS Spyder and upped the car count to the full 24-car grid, to induce the AI to pick the B12/80. Difficulty still Unbeatable. Finish race. My best lap, 1:18.919. AI’s best lap, 1:22.360. AI’s best lap in the Mazda, 1:24.287.

I suspect that I can run this same 5-lap sprint several times again and again and get similar times, both for myself and the AI.

But Chris said that his build was running Unbeatable AI. Yet my retail build AI, in the midst of a full grid, was turning laps almost 5 seconds faster than his dev build on an empty track, which did a 1:29.251.

Something doesn’t smell right here. I don’t think the AI comparison was entirely truthful.

EDIT: Just ran the sprint again. 1:19.560/1:22.998/1:24.558.

Here’s what I think, and here’s why they really should have done a better job demonstrating the AI today, especially showing how it would react when under pressure from other AI or human players. Whoever it was that designed the AI lines finally got to put one in that acts like a human does. “Machine learning”? Nah. My lap times are the times of an average, yet enthusiastic controller user. I know that a seasoned vet with a wheel should be able to knock, at minimum, three seconds off of that, which would put it in line with the 1:16 that was in today’s video.

This is why demos matter, folks.

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AI in FM7 rubber bands. Since the run was Solo it had nothing to rubber band to. Now AI is fast on it’s own with no reference. Idk why he didn’t show what the time would be if there was someone actually racing the unbeatable AI, but judging by your time, he got his point across. The lines were so clean in the FM 2023 run.

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If it were really rubberbanding, it should have matched my pace to keep things competitive. Instead, I was sailing off into the distance after taking the lead while it was holding to the same suggested line that says to brake for corners I knew I could go flat-out in - and even then, it’s still five seconds faster (six if you look at some of the other cars). The AI in 2023, at least per today’s demonstration, has obviously been programmed to not do that.

I don’t think 2023’s AI is going to be as advanced as people want to believe; instead, I’m starting to believe that the people responsible for designing it are getting to operate with the gloves off now.