Great shout. Problem Solved.
SO.... the last six months i've only been racing on my own track builds as i'm trying to finish this Mod/Championship. I've got ten out of twelve tracks completed, and have been fine tuning all the AI stuff with Quali and Race ratios etc, to really get the racing close and competitive. As you c an imagine that's entailed race after race lap after lap on the tracks to get all the timings, AI, tweaks etc... (Shovas see footnote**)
I build my tracks in Bobs BTB then post edit in 3DsimEd. But turns out, Bob's doesn't generate a GRD file. Therefore i've not seen any pre race gridwalks in six months or more. I just copy/paste edited the Anderstorp GRD into one of my tracks and ... Bob's your uncle... nice Gridwalk for my track.
So great shout there Shovas
Now.... all i need to do is figure out how to get my track Load screens working, and install animated flag marshals.
(footnote.***... this m ay interest you, that AI stuff..... i've got it down to a 50 car grid where quali one second covers the first 30 cars, and 2 seconds cover the full grid of 50. A perfect hot lap will get you on the front row, pole or 2nd. but the slightest mistake and you're sixth or tenth on the grid. In race trim, it's balls out ten tenths the full distance (sprint races of 15-20 laps) and if you out break yourself, run wide, etc, three or four will pass you. Battling, the AI will come back at you, if you dive into a corner, up the inside and run a tad wide, they'll undercut, and take back the place. A lot of it was done with the .aiw file values for Worst, Best, Mid ranges, quali/race ratio, AI Range. Which, as you know there's no hard and fast magic number. It changes for each track. So you have to spend hours and hours of putting in the fast laps to trim those figures, sometimes by incriments of 0.001 to get the AI to where you want them, and have realistic competitive racing.
That's something you're quite familiar with Shovas i know, as i read your data on AI.
Another thing i did was apply Talent files for each driver and tweak their values. By limiting some drivers to mid range grid spots, but giving them strong values for race perfomance and overtaking, it also means that even if you, the user, have broken away in a leading group of four or five and are dicing for the race distance, towards the end, one or two cars will close up onto the lead group and inevitable you end up with six or seven cars fighting it out for the win with three laps to go. Having created my own tyre files for the Mini Coop, that is usually just as they go off and the front end starts to get a bit understeerey, so it all gets rather elbows out and arse seat biting as you try to muscle your way through and stop AI coming back at you. It takes a lot of time, but the nett result is, some very realistic close racing.
In terms of AI Range, on most tracks i keep it very close. the field does spread out a bit, because the driver TALENT files have different values, but not overly, for all intents, it's close enough that if you go off, or pit, you'll drop 20 , 30 places or more. But on two tracks where overtaking is harder, one being a street circuit, i deliberately increased the AI range, so twelve laps in, with four laps to go, you're coming up to back markers and it makes it all the more difficult.
Another thing was a tip Bjarne gave me about the Drag Base to remove the disparity. . I played around with that so now the two versions of the Mini Coop im using are identical in perfomance, no disparity, but importantly, tweaking the darg values, now you can't just blast pass someone on the straight like DRS. You can get a tow, but if you're slipstreaming and your hitting the revs and pull out too soon, you'll lose the tow and if anthing they'll edge ahead. So you basically have to stay right in behind, and then it's done last second, duck out, and pass under braking. )
They've just extended lockdown here to end of May. so i've got three more weeks to finish my last two tracks. Hopefully i can solve the LOAD screen issue, get the flag marshals installed, and end of the month i should be able to release this Mini Coop championship mod.
