As far as GT7 goes, a car stopped in the middle of the straight would be covered under double waved yellow flags, so passing it slowly until the green flag actually makes the most sense for a sim game, but not for an arcade game maybe. Rubber banding in GT7 is also a tricky one. Identical times regardless of how you drive makes the most sense, but given essentially identical player selected skill level (that is deliberately made to drive arbitrarily slower than theoretical max), identical driver ability, and identical strategic logic for each AI, there’s little actual racing versus each other that is actually possible, and the only unknown variable is you as the human player. So an AI leader setting the race pace based on the perceived threat from behind (or coming through the pack) makes some amount of sense. It might seem more fair or less Mario Kart if the leader just goes flat out regardless of any perceived future threat (that in real life would be updated target lap-times from a race engineer), but that’s not really how real racing works, either. In real life it’s because there’s always a gamble, and more speed comes at the cost of a higher chance of binning it. But with AI the mistakes basically have to be programmed in. A human player under-driving might cause the AI leader to not feel threatened enough to push, but does it actually help a slower player to win on their selected AI difficulty level? Or does it just keep them closer to the pack? Can you exploit it by deliberately driving slowly, and then gunning it to catch them all off guard to win easily? Or does the leader always react to your pace in realtime? Maybe the answer isn’t to have zombie AI running the same calculated overall race time every race, but in having individual AI cars feel a pressure value based on how close the car behind is, with that pressure value corresponding to increased pace, which in turn increases the likelihood of a random small mistake being introduced which will need to be dynamically corrected, creating opportunities. That then might make the AI more dynamic and push itself, but if you’re still just clearly much faster as a human (for a chosen GT7 difficulty level), you’d always be the perceived future threat from something actually intelligent, so as a hard-coded AI leader your pace should be faster to react to that. In other words, a car whole seconds per lap faster than the entire field and projected to challenge for the win should make the lead AI car push more. And no threat except roughly equally paced cars where you can defend should cause the lead AI car to drive more conservative. I think Sophy is the future of decent racing AI and should be the standard for GT8, but unless you can exploit the rubber-banding so that it rewards driving slowly, I’m not that bothered by it. As a designer you either set AI difficulty by an almost predetermined statically set race time (essentially picked by the player) for the leader regardless of what the player does, or you do it by having them react and adjust their race pace based on a perceived threat up to a fastest lap-time set by the difficulty. In the end it shouldn’t make a difference to a player running their own best race for whatever skill level they chose. But if it is exploitable to get a win by deliberately driving slowly, then the logic is broken and stupid. As always, online multiplayer is the answer. With AI racing, how likely the AI is to win will always be requested by the player, and with Sophy it could never be fully unleashed to do its own thing to the best of its abilities anyway. You’re basically just racing mathematics rather than real people with the same limitations as you. Good AI needs those human limitations, too. It needs to feel pressure, it needs the risk vs reward with pushing, it needs random thresholds for how much pressure it feels or how likely it is to make a mistake per car, and it needs to be more human and adapt its pace based on the threat. We should be seeing different race times based on that. Having AI run basically the same race time every time you run the experiment isn’t the answer, either. That’s just as unrealistic.
Honestly slowing down while under yellow and having to slow to dodge a stopped or incident should not be a negative and more like a positive for realism I agree with.
Brilliant. Possibly the most interesting and fact filled video I've ever seen on racing games. On top of that it was funny. I don't really play driving games anymore so my interest in the results was low but this was still very entertaining. Well done.
Kind of a sim, but the recent f1 games do mostly have good drafting, I weave on the straights to break the tow, and many times if the ai are close enough they follow the weave to keep in the tow, or when you go defensive they follow you, than pull out of the tow to try and go for an overtake which they are pretty decent at
Man I was thinking about you today, I was surprised you didn't make any FM videos, what are the odds lol Also have you tried disabling the boost (rubber banding) in GT7?
I had boost to off, so on theory it's actually off, but who knows with GT. I am waiting a bit on Forza, it's too broken on PC and I am expecting patches. I figure I'll put out a video and they will patch it the next day.. but so far the fixes aren't coming. Maybe I should have put a review out.
It's actually better to set boost to weak. For some reason the rubberbanding is almost but not entirely solved by doing this. Some think the weak and off options are labelled the wrong way round, and some say it's something else, but either way it works and makes racing much more enjoyable. Try it.
GT7 Sophy is honestly a good baseline for consumer level competitiveness for single player AI. Hopefully the next game fully implements it with proper fine tuning for the user to do, as well as career mode having a full Sophy system.
If you do the race with the same car over and over, it is always different for me. Sometimes I can get away on the straight and gain like 2 seconds and sometimes they gain in my slipstream - usually on the 2nd straight before the tunnel.
Codemasters can be criticized for many things, but their AI are really the best. F1 games AI is the only one that I've seen drafting the player and others AI
Thanks for the video. As someone with bad internet I often forced to play offline. So far I've only been playing AC and ACC but looking into another game
I really really wish game devs put more time/effort in the AI. I would much prefer an AI update of any existing game over yet another sim racing title being launched with the same problems. Great video btw, but it was painful to watch how bad AI is in simple obstacle avoidance in all of the sim racing titles :/ holy sh--
GT7 actually has potential to have a great base AI....but for some reason, PD has decided to keep them handicapped, so they would never go full throttle on the straight and alway break way before the actual breaking points....I personally don't mind catch up logic since I see nothing wrong in accommodating AI for low skill players even at highest settings
Yeah, it’s really weird, but it’s not handicapped on all races. (which further proves your point). e.g. on the Clubman clup + races, the ai doesnt hold back at all and is actually really fun to race. Its like it has an extra hard setting that you cant use in the custom races for some reason.
Midnight Club LA AI knows how to draft lol. But really have a good AI, no matter if comparing against arcades or sims. And the game is suave on rubber banding. Anyway... I like some older sim AI better than current ones. Folks did things more simple but better balanced, and the result was better offline racing. New games feel like too much online focused and they leave the AI just as a bonus. Dirt to Daytona AI can use different strategies of pace and pit stop and race as gentlemen, unless you start to bully some driver and he will take revenge. You can feel it specially when racing 100% races. Grand Prix 4 (an all other in this series) have a perfectly functional AI that do everything fine, nothing excellent, somehow predictable, but fair and immersive enough. GTR1, 2 and GT Legends also have an all around AI that plays a lot like GP4... Race 07 is a little inferior because some cars AI are awkward (the GT and open wheels ones), but the main category (that is tourism cars) is spot on. Cheers!
FM7 does NOT have catch up AI. I did a 3 lap race in Dubai where I raced competitively and the AI got a time of 7:46. I did the same exact race but I raced very far from the leader. The AI got a time of 7:42 As for lap times, 2:34 for competitive, 2:33 for far from race leader. FM7 AI is strange... Edit: I take this comment back. FM7 has a crap ton of rubberbanding. FM2023 also has rubberbanding but it's reversed.
You may need to go all the way back to DreamCast 😅 Test Drive LeMans. Best ai in a racing game I've experienced is Mario Kart on GameCube and F-Zero X, also on GameCube 🤷🏿♂️ Finally Blur.
I played many sims and from my experience Assetto Corsa 2014 has the absolute worst AI, and the top is in F1 22 and SRX The Game. And it is the F1 series that HAVE AI DRAFTING !
I feel like it's unrealistic if you're stopped mid corner and the entire field can avoid you... You are going to get hit by someone if you're just sitting there. It's how they figure out to get around after that sells me on the AI.. In a straight, they should be able to avoid you but not mid corner not every car... If they can then we need to be talking about their driving because they are definitely not pushing the limits of the car...
Gran turismo needs to go to AI jail for rubberbanding its not real racing you would think kaz would know better being a racing driver himself. Gt sopfy isn't available on all tracks in gt7
Can't wair for the future with how good sophy is already
Great video. Must have taken an age to put together so thanks for doing it. Clearly there is quite a bit of work to do when it comes to AI racing
really awesome comparison video again! i'm also quite surprised to see the collision avoidance in GRiD
As far as GT7 goes, a car stopped in the middle of the straight would be covered under double waved yellow flags, so passing it slowly until the green flag actually makes the most sense for a sim game, but not for an arcade game maybe.
Rubber banding in GT7 is also a tricky one. Identical times regardless of how you drive makes the most sense, but given essentially identical player selected skill level (that is deliberately made to drive arbitrarily slower than theoretical max), identical driver ability, and identical strategic logic for each AI, there’s little actual racing versus each other that is actually possible, and the only unknown variable is you as the human player.
So an AI leader setting the race pace based on the perceived threat from behind (or coming through the pack) makes some amount of sense.
It might seem more fair or less Mario Kart if the leader just goes flat out regardless of any perceived future threat (that in real life would be updated target lap-times from a race engineer), but that’s not really how real racing works, either.
In real life it’s because there’s always a gamble, and more speed comes at the cost of a higher chance of binning it. But with AI the mistakes basically have to be programmed in.
A human player under-driving might cause the AI leader to not feel threatened enough to push, but does it actually help a slower player to win on their selected AI difficulty level? Or does it just keep them closer to the pack?
Can you exploit it by deliberately driving slowly, and then gunning it to catch them all off guard to win easily? Or does the leader always react to your pace in realtime?
Maybe the answer isn’t to have zombie AI running the same calculated overall race time every race, but in having individual AI cars feel a pressure value based on how close the car behind is, with that pressure value corresponding to increased pace, which in turn increases the likelihood of a random small mistake being introduced which will need to be dynamically corrected, creating opportunities.
That then might make the AI more dynamic and push itself, but if you’re still just clearly much faster as a human (for a chosen GT7 difficulty level), you’d always be the perceived future threat from something actually intelligent, so as a hard-coded AI leader your pace should be faster to react to that.
In other words, a car whole seconds per lap faster than the entire field and projected to challenge for the win should make the lead AI car push more. And no threat except roughly equally paced cars where you can defend should cause the lead AI car to drive more conservative.
I think Sophy is the future of decent racing AI and should be the standard for GT8, but unless you can exploit the rubber-banding so that it rewards driving slowly, I’m not that bothered by it.
As a designer you either set AI difficulty by an almost predetermined statically set race time (essentially picked by the player) for the leader regardless of what the player does, or you do it by having them react and adjust their race pace based on a perceived threat up to a fastest lap-time set by the difficulty. In the end it shouldn’t make a difference to a player running their own best race for whatever skill level they chose.
But if it is exploitable to get a win by deliberately driving slowly, then the logic is broken and stupid.
As always, online multiplayer is the answer. With AI racing, how likely the AI is to win will always be requested by the player, and with Sophy it could never be fully unleashed to do its own thing to the best of its abilities anyway. You’re basically just racing mathematics rather than real people with the same limitations as you.
Good AI needs those human limitations, too. It needs to feel pressure, it needs the risk vs reward with pushing, it needs random thresholds for how much pressure it feels or how likely it is to make a mistake per car, and it needs to be more human and adapt its pace based on the threat. We should be seeing different race times based on that.
Having AI run basically the same race time every time you run the experiment isn’t the answer, either. That’s just as unrealistic.
Honestly slowing down while under yellow and having to slow to dodge a stopped or incident should not be a negative and more like a positive for realism I agree with.
Good points.
Brilliant. Possibly the most interesting and fact filled video I've ever seen on racing games. On top of that it was funny. I don't really play driving games anymore so my interest in the results was low but this was still very entertaining. Well done.
Kind of a sim, but the recent f1 games do mostly have good drafting, I weave on the straights to break the tow, and many times if the ai are close enough they follow the weave to keep in the tow, or when you go defensive they follow you, than pull out of the tow to try and go for an overtake which they are pretty decent at
A truely fantastic analysis!
Man I was thinking about you today, I was surprised you didn't make any FM videos, what are the odds lol
Also have you tried disabling the boost (rubber banding) in GT7?
I had boost to off, so on theory it's actually off, but who knows with GT. I am waiting a bit on Forza, it's too broken on PC and I am expecting patches. I figure I'll put out a video and they will patch it the next day.. but so far the fixes aren't coming. Maybe I should have put a review out.
GT7 still applies boost even if it's turned off for some reason...it's like PD just doesn't want you to lose the race no matter how slow you go lol
It's actually better to set boost to weak. For some reason the rubberbanding is almost but not entirely solved by doing this. Some think the weak and off options are labelled the wrong way round, and some say it's something else, but either way it works and makes racing much more enjoyable. Try it.
GT7 Sophy is honestly a good baseline for consumer level competitiveness for single player AI. Hopefully the next game fully implements it with proper fine tuning for the user to do, as well as career mode having a full Sophy system.
Great video. Thanks for the obvious prep effort.
You're wrong, in GT7 AI can chase in slipstream. I personally noticed this at races on Special Stage Route X.
If you do the race with the same car over and over, it is always different for me. Sometimes I can get away on the straight and gain like 2 seconds and sometimes they gain in my slipstream - usually on the 2nd straight before the tunnel.
Codemasters can be criticized for many things, but their AI are really the best. F1 games AI is the only one that I've seen drafting the player and others AI
Thanks for the video. As someone with bad internet I often forced to play offline. So far I've only been playing AC and ACC but looking into another game
I really really wish game devs put more time/effort in the AI. I would much prefer an AI update of any existing game over yet another sim racing title being launched with the same problems. Great video btw, but it was painful to watch how bad AI is in simple obstacle avoidance in all of the sim racing titles :/ holy sh--
GT7 actually has potential to have a great base AI....but for some reason, PD has decided to keep them handicapped, so they would never go full throttle on the straight and alway break way before the actual breaking points....I personally don't mind catch up logic since I see nothing wrong in accommodating AI for low skill players even at highest settings
Yeah, it’s really weird, but it’s not handicapped on all races. (which further proves your point). e.g. on the Clubman clup + races, the ai doesnt hold back at all and is actually really fun to race. Its like it has an extra hard setting that you cant use in the custom races for some reason.
@jacobfischer3016 yes, also on the last race of human comedy missions at Laggo Maggiore....AI in that race is no joke
Midnight Club LA AI knows how to draft lol. But really have a good AI, no matter if comparing against arcades or sims. And the game is suave on rubber banding.
Anyway... I like some older sim AI better than current ones. Folks did things more simple but better balanced, and the result was better offline racing. New games feel like too much online focused and they leave the AI just as a bonus. Dirt to Daytona AI can use different strategies of pace and pit stop and race as gentlemen, unless you start to bully some driver and he will take revenge. You can feel it specially when racing 100% races. Grand Prix 4 (an all other in this series) have a perfectly functional AI that do everything fine, nothing excellent, somehow predictable, but fair and immersive enough. GTR1, 2 and GT Legends also have an all around AI that plays a lot like GP4... Race 07 is a little inferior because some cars AI are awkward (the GT and open wheels ones), but the main category (that is tourism cars) is spot on.
Cheers!
FM7 does NOT have catch up AI.
I did a 3 lap race in Dubai where I raced competitively and the AI got a time of 7:46.
I did the same exact race but I raced very far from the leader. The AI got a time of 7:42
As for lap times, 2:34 for competitive, 2:33 for far from race leader.
FM7 AI is strange...
Edit: I take this comment back. FM7 has a crap ton of rubberbanding. FM2023 also has rubberbanding but it's reversed.
You may need to go all the way back to DreamCast 😅 Test Drive LeMans.
Best ai in a racing game I've experienced is Mario Kart on GameCube and F-Zero X, also on GameCube 🤷🏿♂️
Finally Blur.
I played many sims and from my experience Assetto Corsa 2014 has the absolute worst AI, and the top is in F1 22 and SRX The Game. And it is the F1 series that HAVE AI DRAFTING !
How do I set AI control in ACC?
technically iracing has great drafting! if you're at Daytona...
I feel like it's unrealistic if you're stopped mid corner and the entire field can avoid you... You are going to get hit by someone if you're just sitting there. It's how they figure out to get around after that sells me on the AI.. In a straight, they should be able to avoid you but not mid corner not every car... If they can then we need to be talking about their driving because they are definitely not pushing the limits of the car...
Gran turismo needs to go to AI jail for rubberbanding its not real racing you would think kaz would know better being a racing driver himself. Gt sopfy isn't available on all tracks in gt7
F1 games not in list….