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Okay, so you have two completely different cars. Both cars have relatively equal top speeds, but the one car has poor acceleration and awesome handling, so it can make it around tight corners at full speed without a lot of trouble. The other car has awesome acceleration and poor handling, so it tends to oversteer and can't make it around tight corners without slowing down.

If you force all cars to slow down around a corner, the car with great handling will slow down even though it doesn't really need to, thus giving it a disadvantage. If you force all cars to go fast, the car with poor handling will go off the road. So, how do you setup a track's AI to allow both cars to perform at their best?

You sure do make a lot of new threads don't you?

Since I don't know much about track AI, I will just give you an educated, yet stupid, guess...


Have you tried going in between what you just said? Or have you only done the extremes of the situation?

You might have yet to find a perfect setup.

Slowing down a car that doesn't need to be slowed down is happening regardless of how "extreme" it is.

i just make one of the AI lines slow down and hope the other one doesnt...

I would setup the AI for an average mid range spec car so that it took the corner at optimum efficency, then I would use the AI Node walls and reduce the node width (this should help reduce speed of extra fast cars with understeer), then I would create another AI racing line outside the main one with different node settings and let it re-join the main racing line after the corner ( this should also help to catch faster cars and keep them racing at optimum speed)

To reduce the risk of oversteer due to too much speed reduction on slower cars I would recomend adding several more Node points and reduce speed in a striaght line before the corner using several different Node settings, then keep all the corner Nodes at the same setting maintaining best possible speed.

Also, try and keep the racing line on as bigger arc as possible to help maintain speed as some corners may not even need speed reduction settings depending on approach speed.
And don't forget to utilise the overtaking line as alternate route.

Setting up AI Nodes can be difficult depending on the chosen AI cars.
Too much tweaking can mess things up, sometimes less is better with direct lines and higher speed reductions at shorter pionts.

I hope you can understand, and hope it helps.

I understand everything except the "sometimes less is better with direct lines and higher speed reductions at shorter points." part.

OK...
Each AI Node point is a corrective decision process for each AI car.
I once theorised that less AI Nodes would probably increase game speed slightly as less processing power would be needed for decision making.

Instead of having 5-6 Node points approaching a corner with settings of 30, 30, 25, 25, 20 ,20 slow down, you could have 2 node points with settings of 25, 15 slow down. Depending on the distance from the corner and the approach they may provide better response and efficeincy from your AI cars.

Hense a more direct line but higher reductions/slow down's.

Is that easier to understand ?

Okay, so less nodes on straight lines and more extreme speed reductions. What about corners and esses? Would more nodes be better or worse? Actually I can see some benefits to using less nodes in certain situations where cars might overshoot the intended race line, at which point they'd practically do a U-turn in order to get back on track if the nodes are too close. But if the next node is far away, they'd only need to do an L turn to aim for it.

But basically your solution for my question was to have the inside of the turn - where cars are supposed to drive - be the normal race route while the outside of the turn would contain an alternative route but with heavier braking since, only cars which were understeering would end up in that route anyway. Correct?

It sounds like most track AIs could be a lot more complex than people bother with.

Aeon @ Feb 24 2008, 11:42 PM wrote:But basically your solution for my question was to have the inside of the turn - where cars are supposed to drive - be the normal race route while the outside of the turn would contain an alternative route but with heavier braking since, only cars which were understeering would end up in that route anyway. Correct?

Yes, correct!

It sounds like most track AIs could be a lot more complex than people bother with.

Only if you want to race with super custom AI cars, otherwise stock AI and custom AI with similar performance will be of a reasonable challenge on a basic tweaked track.
Hilaire9's tracks have a reasonably basic AI and I find them hard to beat with stock AI cars.

Actually what works pretty good I'm finding is simply not filling the entire racing area with AI nodes, but rather only filling area where you actually want the cars to BE with AI nodes. That way, on a steep curve where cars will have a lot of speed, if the car can make it around the corner without trouble, then its all well and good. But if the car can't make it, they will slide outside the nodes, at which point the AI thinks, "Wait a minute, I'm off the track! Better slow down and get back into position". At that point, the AI then decides to slow down and steer back onto the AI line. Seems to work pretty well.

Oh and I'm testing this on Zagames' recent F1-style track if you need a visual of what kind of corners I'm talking about.

I understand fully.

As in real motor racing, the tracks are reasonably wide but only a narrow strip is used for the optimum racing line.
This is what I was trying to explain in my first post, but rather than let the car brake heavily until it returns to the racing line I suggested that you add a second racing line to keep the car at optimum speed.
Don't attach the second racing line as an alternate route but start it independently and attach it to the normal route as it feeds back on the normal racing line.

Also, don't forget to utalise the different Node settings to maintain the best AI response.