Quote from Scawen :

I've released D41 with the improved overtaking.


I think it's a lot better but there are some remaining issues:

- There is sometimes a hesitation when the AI wants to make a pass, and is just behind and correctly offset from the car in front, so it appears that it should go for it at that point but hangs back a bit.

- Sometimes an AI may collide with another vehicle mid corner, because it has gone in too fast and although it wants to brake, it doesn't think it has enough spare grip to apply the brakes strongly enough.

- They are still a bit too keen to overtake when their current speed is low, because they aren't taking account of the time it will take to accelerate to the speed they should be at.

- Another mistake that I see often is where the vehicle in front has a different line, and can come across in front of the AI behind which doesn't expect that to happen, then there can be a crash.

- I've looked at the calculation for braking and think there is (and always has been) an issue where it assumes the brake balance is *just right* for each corner. I wonder if I can make the braking adapt for the actual brake balance, but I don't have time for that at least today or tomorrow.

- Obviously they are still not as fast as real drivers but I won't be tackling that for this round of test patches.

https://www.lfs.net/forum/thread/102117

Wow that was a pretty quick turnaround on these changes, thanks!

After re-running a bunch of tests I can happily say that the AI are significantly better at racing all around, these last few patches have brought massive improvements across the board which I'm really happy too see.

I did also observe all those further issues you have listed above in my testing, however one minor additional thing I did notice is sometimes the AI can be a tad aggressive and can end up banging wheels with other AI or scraping them against the walls on the exits of fast turns, this usually is mostly harmless and both cars usually get away with extremely minor damage (if any), but in a couple of cases (especially with bikes) it did trigger a wreck.

Quote from Avraham Vandezwin :

So, I ask you these questions:
Have you observed the same “trend” at home?
How many times have you repeated your experiments to establish your conclusions?

As I mentioned I've run several tests with multiple cars both from official LFS content and the mod pool, I have no clue on the exact numbers but I spent a good couple of hours trying different stuff and seeing what happend. The results were very consistent across the board for me no matter how many re-attempts and I adjusted my comments as I went along with any new/updated notes I had after each run to make sure I was certain on my observations.

At the end of the day though, that's all these are is just some observations with a sprinkling of opinions on where I personally think the limitations of these new AI changes sit, so I'm not surprised people will have different viewpoints to my own. Overall I do think these changes as they currently stand are a very positive step forward for the AI in LFS, but of course there's always room for improvement

First of all been loving following up on these test patch changes, some great stuff in here and as someone who mostly does random stuff offline the recent AI stuff is definitely something I'm very happy to see.

That being said, not sure how relevant these are to what's already been brought up or the scope of the AI improvements for these builds, but I do have a couple of points I'd like to mention after some testing with a few cars (both base content & mods) mostly on the Kyoto Oval (ovals are a great place to really stress test AI racing behaviour imo) on patch D40:

- When an AI tries to go and overtake, they throw the wheel out quite aggressively in the direction they wish to go, which at high speed in cars with lower grip can cause them to get thrown into a slide or a tankslapper and eventually spin/crash. This behaviour is probably fine at lower speeds but might not be a bad idea to see if there's a way to make them steer less aggressively to overtake as the speed gets higher.

- AI seem to be a bit too eager/early to try and overtake and will sometimes jump out of line when they don't have a run on the car ahead meaning they go nowhere. I have no clue how they exactly judge overtakes, but if there's some way of them being able to better take the speed difference between the two cars into account to determine whether or not they jump out or back in to line when making an overtaking attempt then that would help them race better and make overtaking attempts more successful.

- AI sometimes will crash into the rear/sides of another car that's trying to overtake if they're trying to pass them (e.g P3 can crash into P2 whilst trying to pass them if P2 is trying to pass P1).

- Now that the AI are more willing to run side-by-side with these updates it makes their "emergency braking" when being squeezed occur much more commonly. This behaviour has always been my biggest bugbear with the LFS AI and now that it's more frequent, I'd definitely personally love to see the AI emergency braking dialed back a lot, especially at high speed (maybe even reduced to just a short lift-off on the throttle at high speed as that's all it takes to get out of some of these situations) but also to maybe make the thresholds that causes it to trigger for the AI to be much tighter as it's always felt way too sensitive with them backing out of scenarios where two cars could easily fit alongside one another.

Hopefully these are of some degree of use and not just nonsense rambling, but if they are I'll just happily return to my cave lol and patiently wait for future updates