Have Your Say: How Important Is AI Racing To You?

The most essential for me.

It is hard to commit to the league or online racing schedules. It is also hard for me to compete without a wheel. Without a good AI, the racing games have no meaning for me.

I like a little mix of both online and off.
I feel good racing ai, fully customizable grid and driver attributes is essential for a game like AMS2 due to its lack of online player activity.

Gives the user a chance to experience the variety of content within the game, outside of the 4 GT3 cars and something to do other than hotlap.

Hopefully, Reiza Will continue to develop the ai further and make the UI easier to customize.

Of all the Sims, iRacing I'd say has the easiest and best customizable AI within a UI, not all the content has been made available yet but overall the ai behavior is pretty good.

Raceroom has good ai and a nice variety of content tho lacks in customization.
If it wasn't for the AI the game would be collecting dust due to the lack of online activity in my region.

So yes, I find ai important for the longevity of a game.

Ai is the one aspect of Sim Racing that has not progressed as much as the other areas. If ai would have improved over the years like Physics, Graphics and gear, none of us would be complaining about bad ai.

As an offline-only racer myself, I'm another vote for AI as essential! I want to race the car I want at the track I want at the time I want against the selection of real-world competitors (with correct liveries) I want. Wow, that sounds entitled and demanding... but it's true and it's what AI racing allows that's so special.

In my view, the main room for progress in sim road racing AI is in the "special sauce" of each race series. When well-calibrated, even rF1-era ISImotor AI races well enough "door to door" in circuit racing in my opinion. But what about safety cars, pits opening and closing, refueling rules, AI tyre and fuel pit strategy including under/overcuts, group versus individual versus sprint race qualifying, different kinds of starts, F1 versus endurance 'blue flag' behaviour, competition cautions/stage racing etc? Generally, this is missing from modern sims, and it's a shame.

Oval racing AI is a bigger challenge for "sim racing" titles, though. Even in door to door racing. Games not pitched as 100% "sims" like NASCAR Heat and SRX The Game manage to handle it quite well, it appears, but ISImotor oval racing is poor (if not downright disastrous). And AC AI is only designed for road racing. It's high time someone gets oval sim racing AI right, but until then we offline sim racers can enjoy NR2003

adderboba44 said:

What's so important, and I think which is missing from many offline racing games, is the inclusion of random racing elements - driver mistakes, blue flags, safety cars, unreliability, pit stop errors, wet weather changes, even debris which all needs to be taken into account. Grand Prix 3 & Grand Prix 4 included most of these, so it's surely not a question of technology not being sophisticated enough.

Click to expand...

Yes! 100% agree.

This stuff is SO important, but much of it is not "technologically hard" to do – it's simply a matter of devs choosing to devote the time to implement the features. And realistically, this means tradeoffs. Personally, I'm okay with devs omitting certain other features to deliver a more complete AI experience. But others may not share my opinion.

For example, there's no technological constraint against a super general framework within which to set up championship rulesets around practice/ qualifying/pit stops/rules that could accomodate everything from the Gatorade Duels or Supercars to F1 or the Indy 500. It's simply a matter of devs choosing to sit down and design the system. I've actually been beginning sketching out such a system for fun (I must be a sadomasochist at heart ) and it's 100% possible... it just takes time.

Another example that comes to mind is how when you crash your car in Geoff Crammond's Grand Prix 4, a marshal walks out, pushes your car to the barrier, and then a crane lifts the car over the barrier. There's no reason more recent sims couldn't do this... but they just didn't take the time to create this feature, and chose to focus on other things.

EDIT: the one feature that is truly technologically hard is wet weather. Gran Turismo 7 is super exciting, because they have implemented an impressive dynamic track surface in the rain – including the grippiness and accumulation of water on and off the racing line in the wet – and the "wet line" where AI with wet tyres on a track with a drying racing line will drive off-line to cool their tyres. This sort of stuff is bloody hard to do well, though, and has required substantial innovation on Polyphony's part to get GT to this point.

AI 99.9% of the time.

Since 1994 I play offline (Nascar Papyrus). In 2020 I started to run mutliplayer but I didn't like it much because of fanboys, obligation with schedules, training for many hours... etc.
I went back to offline mode and I'm still happy!

It' is critical to me. It is much better than the "AI" of online racers.

Must have. If no AI, no sim racing for me

A.I. has helped me get into a rhythm on a track I am not familiar with. Its also nice to jump into a race and not having to worry an alien throwing you off course ---

AI is everything in a sim for me. I don't spend enough time on any one sim to be good enough to compete online, and I don't want to mess up someone else's race when I'm just out there having fun. I frankly don't care if a sim has any online component, but AI is a must.

As a primarily offline simmer for soon 37 years I think I'm supposed to answer "pretty important?"

Speaking driver names, ancient sims came with authentic seasons. Then the official real world big series got their eyes on this and closed expensive exclusive rights, which we see the result of as today, but easily get around with, and now even easier with downloadable mods.

Years ago having more time, I enjoyed especially in GTR2 setting up my own series, e.g. as preparation for real world series weekends spanning from WEC, Petit Lemans Series, F1, European Ferrari Challenge, Super GT, etc.
Simracing historic series in historic mods on the contrary is easy since modders of historic sims aims for authenticity and don't have naming rights issues, requiring no post name editing.

However, for recent years having lesser and lesser time for those kind of editing, I just grab what's available and speaking mentioned AMS2 livery+AI mods I've enjoyed it immensely.

Glancing the headline I thought the question was on solely on AI/AIW performance/behavior, of which I did a lot of editing for myself in also especially GTR2.
Here I would say the AI/AIW job is more important than driver names, when the goal is competitive offline simracing.

But as I mentioned in the thread about offline simracing I have tons of other joys than the competitive focus.

For me simracing is first of all about immersion, and real driver names are a part of this immersion, combined with realistic AI performance, reflecting the difference between teams/drivers on the grid.

I've had lots of quality time and great pleasure driving midfield/backmarker race cars in historic mods, having close battles in mid field or fighting for not to be the last to the checkered flag and during race experiencing the rush getting lapped by the big superstars. And if the FFB feels authentic on top of that, I really cannot ask for more.

Edit: When I once in a while enter online racing, I don't use offline AI racing as preparation. And when I in the other thread mentioned offline racing as preparation for my participation in the Formula SimRacing Series back in 2003-2004, the AI part was irrellevant for me. My focus was purely on car setup/pit strategy optimization, simming full GP distance. Just driving with AI's in order not to get bored

only do offline to prepare for my weekly league race, setting the weather and time of day which we use later the same week helps to figure out temps and stuff, would be too boring to do that on an empty track ... not to forget rally, which can be done with very little loss offline, but haven't done that for almost a year, too little time.

Wow! I hoped this would be a good discussion topic, but I never thought there would be this many replies, and quality ones at that! Thank you for contributing your thoughts, very interesting to read them all

I agree about random elements like mistakes, that made the races in GP2, 3 and 4 feel like actual events. It's a shame that that series vanished after GP4 - imagine the things a team with that passion could have done with more modern technology.

Growing older and turning into a casual simmer because of time constraints, AI is essential. I just don't have the patience for online racing. Pick up racing is not really working in my preferred sims, league racing on the other hand is too much of a hassle for me, I just cannot commit to a weekly schedule.

Essential for me too, i dont do online.

I only hotlap and AI race. I have little desire to invest the extra time to participate in online races. I want to sit down in my rig and dial up exactly the car, track, weather, time of day, AI strength and number of opponents. The quality of AI is huge for my wants.

I had to quit racing online for health reasons. Sad thing is PC race sim AI is shockingly bad and hasn't really improved since GTR2. AC is woeful. ACC is pretty good in my experience. Can't afford AMS2 so no idea how that is these days.

Raceroom is good but as someone disabled and on a limited income I can't be splurging on content. (Same with iRacing) so I have very limited options there.

Plus everyone races the same track and car combos online. With AI you can race how YOU want. (In my case I love Matra F3 at Bannochbrae. Never finding that online!) Not to mention given differing skill levels, despite simming for 25 years, I'm slow. With AI I can feel like Senna rather than Mazepin.

So I consider AI very important. Not everyone wants to or even can race online (even if could, my Internet latency would ruin other peoples racing and I wouldn't do that).

Also AI allows you to do much longer racing than you can usually get online, which brings up the other issue in most race sims. LACK OF MID RACE SAVE! Sure people will moan about realism etc... But Max Verstappen doesn't have his phone ringing mid race, a knock at the door, have to deal with his laundry etc... GTR2 had it. There is ZERO excuse for sims getting close to two decades later not having it.

As someone on the AS without a mic and not very good at socializing with randos, especially not in the tension of an online match (even if the only stakes are the players' pride), racing with AI is critical to my enjoyment of a sim as I rarely if ever touch their online aspects.

The last time I raced online, several months ago, I hit another driver. It was my fault, I moved over on him due to my lack of awareness. So then I basically froze my line and held my car outside so he could get past me. However, He spent the next several turns repeatedly hitting me until he cut a corner and took us both out. Yeah...AI may suck, but so do us humans.

As a shift worker it hard get to do online racing, to be apart of a community. AI racing is what I can do most of the time to get my fix.