Level 8 AI does not lift or leave space on the Inside

Forza Motorsport Forza Motorsport (2023) Discussion
21

From my impression the ai is very well aware of you. All this shambles that the cars in front of you fabricate aim at making it as hard as possible for you to pass and catch up to leading cars ahead.

This farcical braking on straights or behind apex as well as the oopsies, cars losing grip and drifting into your lane in front of you occurs In 95% of cases to cars within a specific range ahead of you, but rarely to the ones further ahead of you, pulling away meanwhile.

And I suspect there is an ā€œassigned contrahentā€ implemented at least occasionally who will attack you with increased agression even when behind or alongside and go bonkers.

May be wrong, but appears to me rather like algorithms implemented to increase feeling of race action spectacle for the player, not AI.
Iā€™d say they just turned something like ā€œagression intensityā€ higher or lower between updates, but the patterns of that behaviour didnā€™t change much.

Playing FH1 recently made me think, this magnetic drivatar attraction to the players car and his line is generally the Forza-Formula for SP vs AI racing. Was it different in FM 3 or 4?

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22

In my experience the AI is not even aware of itself. After ending up in the back, I will come around a turn and see chaos everywhere. One AI scraping along the wall well off the track. A second AI making an unsafe return to the track, and off in the distance in the next turn 3 AI cars in a wad as the outer 2 turn into the one stuck in the middle. This mess continues until the field spreads out into a line. Things remain peaceful until they start lapping cars, and the chaos begins again.

The problem is not that they donā€™t ā€œseeā€ the player. They donā€™t properly ā€œseeā€ other cars period.

The only time they appear aware of another vehicle is when it is directly in front of them. I have seen them panic break just as often behind other AI cars as I have seen them do it behind my car.

2 Likes
23

If I have to summarize the defects if the AI in one only sentence, I would say that they arenā€™t able to overcome.
The AI is always very very conservative when overcoming slower cars, even when they are behind the player. This is the cause for unexpected braking in the corners, that sometimes is very annoying.
And for the same reason the player is able to gain many positions after the star, when the cars are very close.
Maybe a more sophisticated behaviour would have required more CPU power, too much for consoles. So the producer decided to adopt a conservative and CPU friendly solution.

24

Thatā€™s how I see it too, I had multiple races where ai went out of racing line, going straight for kill.

25

We got better ai in Xbox 360 era xd

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27

I canā€™t agree or disagree on that, since I skipped the Xbox 360 and One era.

Do you really think the AI was better at that time? Were AI drivers aware of other cars and were they able to follow different racing lines?

28

I returned to FM7 recently to refresh my memories and AI was worse there. Slow, predictable and glued to the racing line. So it was easy to deal with but racing against AI was awfully boring. Sometimes frustrating too when someone turned on the rubberbanding.

After all I prefer the AI in FM23. But T10 needs to keep tweaking it so that opponents are more and more competitive and less and less frustrating. Itā€™s significantly better than when the game launched but still long way to go :slight_smile:

2 Likes
29

Ignore behaviour of the backfield drivatars.

Ingame-record a race you start from the back on a difficulty where you will not fly through the field immediately but be able to catch up with the lead before finish.
In replay, watch the the first ~5-6 cars. the runaway pack. As long as they are something like 2-3+ secs ahead they will mostly be driving nearly flawless like on railtracks, no matter how tight they are packed or not. Oopsies very rare. Occasionally their brakelights will flicker like for that brake blocking, but without slowing them down.

Once you come nearer things change. Last ones of them will fall back and start driving erratically, in the process literally parking at apex, brakechecking at exit and performing oopsies leading them to drift into your direction after exit.

When a drivatar gets assigned to you and you are in direct duell with him, relate his speed to the cars ahead he was driving onlevel trainlike until, as last one not faster than the ones ahead.
As long as assigned he will suddenly get faster when exit- and cornering speed is needed to make passing harder for the player, suddenly much faster than the drivatars ahead. And occasionally overdo that and fly into that cars ahead like a torpedo. Often going wide out then, sometimes crashing into them. And once youā€™ve passed him returns to his normal speed. Rinse and repeat for the next one between you and P1.

Never noticed drivatars steering their cars towards you in the last moment when passing, away off their raceline in turns or on straights? Mostly just scratching your rear, but still somewhat magnetic in identic fashion like in FH5, like many other AI-patterns in FM.

That patterns occur in your proximity, but very rarely in the runaway pack before youā€™re near.

And that they are aware of cars behind and alongside is easy to detect when you pass them inside with more speed, you will often see a reaction by them, trying to avoid a potential divebomb by you.

Once more accustomed to this patterns you can to some degree outfox the AI by luring them on one line and take the other one then, thats why I suspect fixed patterns rather than any sort of evolving Artificial ForzaIntelligence.

Intensity varies, the patterns donā€™t.

30

I have watched. What I have observed it is not the presence of the player that matters but how many cars are around. As I mentioned above, I have watched two AI cars turn into opposite sides of a third AI car well in front of me. I donā€™t deny that there could be a little suspicious coding involving the car immediately behind, but I personally suspect that the broken aerodynamics have not been completely fixed.

As for the lead cars, of course they drive trouble free. The leader has no one in front of him to think about, and soon afterwards the second-place car is in the same situation (then 3rd, 4th, 5th and so on as the field stretches out). I have run some longer races, and as soon as those runaway cars catch up with the rear of the field, they start driving like idiots too, even when I am half a lap away. I have blown past a higher-class AI car that had run away into the distance because it was too afraid to pass the back marker in front of him long enough for me to make up the half-lap distance to him (repeatedly). On one longer race I lapped the initial runaway car several times as he was stuck struggling to pass different slow cars and caught him off the track too in a sweeper. (The panic slam on the brakes because the car in front is on my line)

From what I have seen, the AI cannot handle other traffic around them. They are incredible when on their own, but either panic when their line is occupied, or are nearly blind to everyone else on the track. Why they only care about cars directly in front I donā€™t know.

Actually, come to think of it there is one other situation I have somewhat regularly see them react to (again both when I am there and when I am elsewhere). They will also often slam on the brakes in slight high-speed bends when there is another car close behind. I wonder if this is not an artifact of being trained with the already mentioned broken aerodynamics where the rear car affected the car in front and not the other way around.

31

I explicitly mentioned ā€¦ when driving in close touch trainlike.
Not to forget the senseless lane change on straights towards the wrong entry side to prevent you from passing there.

Most appealing direction to steer to for Drivatars is consistently where you can be expected next.

Seeing behavioural patterns is admittedly pretty subjective, lets agree to disagree here, ok? :wink:

32

Glad to know Iā€™m not the only one getting griefed by the AI.

33

That isnā€™t quite true. Before the most recent update the area of awareness the AI had of you was larger but now it is only when your front axle is even with their front axle. Obviously you cannot see this anymore but it is noticeable on straights in which the driving line slowly cross from one side to the other, in the past if you were even with the rear the AI would stop drifting across the track but now they will actively push you off.
Not going to say that making a good racing AI is easy (every racing game Iā€™ve every played has had an issue) but I feel that they need to go back to having the AI have a larger awareness area.

34

How is your experience with AI after Update 12?

Iā€™ve done only 6 or 7 races so far but I think there is an improvement, AI drivers seem to leave more space on the inside when I try to overtake them (not every time though) and ram my car rarer. Iā€™m also surprised to see that nearly no opponent gets penalties nowā€¦ but that could be caused by changes to FRR rather than AI improvements. I can still see lots of minor (sometimes not so minor) collisions between AI cars on replays (especially using the new ā€œpoints of interestā€ cameras), but they usually are able to save themselves from leaving the track. I like those improvements :slight_smile:

35

I have not tried yet. But it looks promising, gonna give it a try tonight, have to unlock that jordan luca car

1 Like
36

TRying that too.

37

U have it already itā€™s gift car.

38

I havenā€™t seen much if any difference. When passing in the corners they still donā€™t leave the room on the inside when I am next or just ahead of them when entering the corner. I have noticed that they are even more likely to slide in front of me on straights just as I am about to start passing them. Also noticed that they are more than happy to slide into you on straights as long as they are only impacting your rear quarter panel so that they perform a PIT on you or just make it impossible for you to turn (I notice they do not get penalized for this but you do).

In short I have seen no difference with this update.

39

Havent seen any difference.

There used to be a text file i nthe game install dir that had some info on the AI model, but it seems it was removed so I cant even say if it was actually updated or not :frowning: