Gran Turismo 6 AI discussion

  • Thread starter JBanton
  • 803 comments
  • 79,306 views
The A.I is so stupid in GT5 I nailed S license gold on a single sweep (S license is just overtake challenges). They basically slow down when you're close or beside them :lol:

Atleast I got me a free GTR SpecV GT Academy :P
 
sparkytooth
The A.I is so stupid in GT5 I nailed S license gold on a single sweep (S license is just overtake challenges). They basically slow down when you're close or beside them :lol:

Atleast I got me a free GTR SpecV GT Academy :P
Click to expand...

Yup, the S license is the easiest one of them all by far.
 
PepeMickey
You can, look at what Codies did, the registered lap times aren't real, you can see the AI car going slower than you but still registering faster lap times. It's an ilusion...
Click to expand...

This or rubber banding is the easy fix for AI, Rubber banding may provide a challenge but people(me included) have argued that it isn't necessary in a sim,The Ai model it'self if improved it will automatically affect lap times of Ai for the better aswell
 
Tenacious D
Just as she is with her muck app, I think people have too much emotional attachment to things being a certain way. Handicapping cars, handicapping bots... really, what's the difference?
Click to expand...

As I pointed out earlier, essentially none.

The one thing the Aspec points system provides though, is the mystery aspect of; How many points are achievable?

Which car do you use and how does it need to be setup to achieve that objective?

This element provides a whole nuther game, within the game, and creates a vast extension of playing time through the mystery of the challenge.

I suppose this concept could still be applied through a leveled AI system.

Basically, it's the indivdual players perception and preference as to whether they would rather have,
the bots being able to speed up, or the player is imposed with restrictions, in an effort to slow you down.

Same result either way.
Difficulty increases.
 
I thought they were unnecessarily picking on you SCJet, but sometimes it takes a while for my lightbulb to turn on. 💡

I think if they would stick to the notion of wanting humanlike A.I., they would have more traction in this debate. But as I said, I haven't really been too impressed with any game's bots. On the one end, there are the sim bots like in GTR which are polite, bland and basically in the way, and on the other you have Forza's which are skillful brats who can wig out on you without warning. And in the middle are GT5's, which are kind of cool but still have the bad habits of all the previous GTs.

But we have two games which hold promise in Forza 5 and GT6. Forza's Drivatar algorithmic learning routines originally used in F1 apparently gleam techniques from both you and from gamers across the internet, which I'm quite curious about. And Kaz evidently has some people working on new routines for their bots on two levels, something better and evidently something revolutionary. While I'd love to see revolutionary, I'll take what I can get.
 
sparkytooth
The A.I is so stupid in GT5 I nailed S license gold on a single sweep (S license is just overtake challenges). They basically slow down when you're close or beside them :lol:

Atleast I got me a free GTR SpecV GT Academy :P
Click to expand...

It wasn't that way at launch. The submissive AI was added in an update after people complained it was getting in the way too much. Really this was just that it stubbornly held its line when you tried to steal its space, but the biased collision handling meant you usually went pirouetting off into the kitty litter whilst they carried on regardless. Presumably they didn't check the knock on effects of this change.

I'm curious as to how they'll handle the improvements, because clearly it's about the way they navigate the tracks rather than their raw pace; the latter is easily changed, even if you have to "cheat".
Currently it seems like it's waypoint based, with the double braking before and at the apex (which has carried over from older games). It's not like these are fixed / hand-made, necessarily, because the course creator tracks have an accurate driving line and, hence, the AI can drive them, although they don't like elevation changes...

Having worked a (tiny) little bit on crowd dynamics, in the context of grouping and space sharing, and the associated pathfinding in that context, I could think of a few interesting things to try. But it's making it all work at runtime in a game that's difficult.
 
Relevant portion from SIMHQ E3 Impressions


http://simhqmotorsports.com/wp/feature-e3-2013-recap-part-i-gran-turismo-6/


Regarding AI, the new suspension model (mentioned above) is applied to the AI cars, so Taku tells us you’ll see more AI car suspension movement and they’ll react accordingly. AI will race with each other, and will get aggressive with you if you get aggressive with them. To quote Taku, you won’t see any “ducks in a row” AI racing in GT6.
Click to expand...
 
It would be nice to see an A.I. that is somewhere between the crazy suicidal A.I. in Grid 2 and the overly safe Ned Flanders A.I. in GT5, guess we'll just have to wait and see won't we.
 
jvchevy27
...the overly safe Ned Flanders A.I. in GT5
Click to expand...

That's the best description of GT5's AI I've ever heard! :lol: "Oh, you wanna overtake me on the inside going into turn 1? Okaly dokaly, I'll brake super early & let you past neighbor!"

Let's hope they nail it for GT6.
 
I think there's actually 2 problems with GT5's AI.

1) It uses the exact same algorithms as your b-spec driver, but it gets no input from a player. That means that the AI emotion-bar cools off when driving with no other cars around, and it actually ends up going up to 10 seconds slower on an average lap than it could do. Now, that is not even good behaviour in b-spec (the gap between fast and slow laps is just too big - show me one driver whose laptimes vary by that much), but when you are competing against the AI, this is unacceptable. And yet, it would be easy to fix. You would just have to force the AI to stay at a fixed emotion-state that represents something close to what produces their ideal laptime. That would already be a big step.

I can see why PD chose to use this emotion-behaviour. In an ideal form, it would help to keep a field together, because single cars out front would slow so that the others could catch up again, thus creating a self-regulating system. Only problem is, that the (current) car selection in the provided races is not good enough for this kind of thing.

2) The general behaviour of the AI has too many flaws. They have been discussed at length here already, so I don't want to repeat the whole list. Too early braking, braking mid-corner, letting you through when you're in a certain position to their car ... it all seems like it hasn't been properly tested, so the algorithmic flaws were never ironed out. I do admit though that this one is harder to fix than 1).
 
I agree that B-spec is a major factor. Instead of developing the AI to be the correct speeds to give a challenge to a human player, they also had to make sure that in the same chase-the-rabbit races a b-spec AI would be able to win, and be able to make its way through the field. Which lead to the ridiculous behaviour when being passed (or not and just near a car) and ultra slow laptimes.

Until they drop this Ridge Racer/F355 Challenge arcade style of "chase the yellow car" it will always be an arcade racer, no matter how far they go with the physics. But they can't change that if they keep on with b-spec in its current GT5 form, imo.
 
According to this:

http://simhqmotorsports.com/wp/feature-e3-2013-recap-part-i-gran-turismo-6/

the AI problems will be over in GT6.

"Regarding AI, the new suspension model (mentioned above) is applied to the AI cars, so Taku tells us you’ll see more AI car suspension movement and they’ll react accordingly. AI will race with each other, and will get aggressive with you if you get aggressive with them. To quote Taku, you won’t see any “ducks in a row” AI racing in GT6."
 
SuperCobraJet
According to this:

http://simhqmotorsports.com/wp/feature-e3-2013-recap-part-i-gran-turismo-6/

the AI problems will be over in GT6.

"Regarding AI, the new suspension model (mentioned above) is applied to the AI cars, so Taku tells us you’ll see more AI car suspension movement and they’ll react accordingly. AI will race with each other, and will get aggressive with you if you get aggressive with them. To quote Taku, you won’t see any “ducks in a row” AI racing in GT6."
Click to expand...

Well, that's sure encouraging. Interesting interview.
 
NCRthree
Well, that's sure encouraging. Interesting interview.
Click to expand...
It doesn't really tell anything relevant, since a suspension model alone doesn't automatically make an AI better.
Additionally, that with the aggressiveness was said before for other GT titles as well.


The ducks in a row racing... we'll see. If they start driving all over the place I don't want to call it an improvement.
 
SuperCobraJet
To quote Taku, you won’t see any “ducks in a row” AI racing in GT6."
Click to expand...

I think I remember them saying almost exactly the same either before GT5 launch or when they released one of the updates.

I'll believe it when I see it.

By the way, the "ducks in a row" are not the problem. The problem is, that even when there is a clear gap to dive into, the AI mostly chickens out and does not overtake. I think the situational awareness algorithms are just not refined enough. It looks like the AI is sort of "feeling" what is around it (corners, opponents) and reacts to obstacles accordingly (which is why it can drive any track creator track), but in certain situations there is some "false alarm" that triggers them to be over-cautious.
 
Yes, they said a lot of things before GT5. My thinking is that at least some of that just wasn't working to PD's satisfaction, or couldn't be squeezed in with the Premiums and their LoDs and everything else. Here's hoping the impressive optimisation they've already achieved for GT6 means they can actually deliver this time - I expect this is what Kaz meant by "breakthroughs".

The chickening out thing was added in a patch, by the way. It was more like Prologue to begin with - ruthless at times. But that apparently annoyed a lot of people, because you were more likely to drive around them than they were you.
 
In response to the locked thread on what needs to be improved:

The braking mid and exit corner has been improved in the GTA 13 demo, BUT:

- They have to drive faster times in general (we need a adjustable difficulty setting; not too hard to program i think).
- AI needs to acknowledge your presence (now they do not know you are there)
- AI needs to fight back meaning they have to be able to distinguish another line into the corner if you are in their way (now they only follow one line at all costs and that is the ideal one albeit they are driving that slow).
- AI needs to be able to adjust their pit strategy according to the circumstances during a endurance race. Now they do not change tyre compounds, or decide to do shorter or longer stints.
- AI needs to pit faster during endurance races, when their tyres are old. In GT5 they just kept on doing extra laps on iceskates until they reached their set pitstop window.

Don't have a clue if this would be easy to program, but PD have the talent and the resources to be able to do that, if only they would put it onto their priority list...
 
mister dog
In response to the locked thread on what needs to be improved:

The braking mid and exit corner has been improved in the GTA 13 demo, BUT:

- They have to drive faster times in general (we need a adjustable difficulty setting; not too hard to program i think).
- AI needs to acknowledge your presence (now they do not know you are there)
- AI needs to fight back meaning they have to be able to distinguish another line into the corner if you are in their way (now they only follow one line at all costs and that is the ideal one albeit they are driving that slow).
- AI needs to be able to adjust their pit strategy according to the circumstances during a endurance race. Now they do not change tyre compounds, or decide to do shorter or longer stints.
- AI needs to pit faster during endurance races, when their tyres are old. In GT5 they just kept on doing extra laps on iceskates until they reached their set pitstop window.

Don't have a clue if this would be easy to program, but PD have the talent and the resources to be able to do that, if only they would put it onto their priority list...
Click to expand...

I completely agree with most of your points, so I won't go into those.

AI in endurance races pits when a) the driver's stamina drops below 10% or something similar, b) the tyres reach a certain state or c) when it calculates that the fuel will last for less than 2 more laps.

The main problem is a), in my opinion. Since it doesn't make a whole lot of difference for your own drivers to leave them running as long as you'd like, you can adapt your stints to whatever is best, but they have to come in although they have tyres and fuel left. Which then also leads to the short-stint problem in the 24h Le Mans race, because all of the AI-drivers are totally spent and don't get the time to recover, because the other two are driving shorter stints as well. It's a vicious cycle that PD actually should have patched in the last 2 years.
 
I think the future of AI has to be programmable and adaptable AI. The downfall of all AI is that it is a one size fits all model by definition. What if you want to set up a particular race, and you could run a few laps in the car of your choice, and the game recorded your best laps and lap times and "creates" an AI for that track/car combo based on your specific driving skills? Better yet, the game learns and adapts to your driving style and speed over time as you progress through career mode/ASpec. and with enough experience is able to adapt AI to your skill level no matter what car/tire/track combination you choose. Adapting on the fly as the race progresses would push it over the top!!

What could be more challenging than racing against AI of your exact skill level? Perhaps PS4 will bring that kind of computing power into play.
 
I think the AI does pretty good...when I'm behind them. But for some reason when you get close they make the slowest turns ever and it's like they let you pass. And when you do pass it's like they give up and fall back. I really don't get how I can chase a car for half a lap and then all of a sudden I'm 5 seconds ahead after passing them.
 
ItIsOkBro
I think the AI does pretty good...when I'm behind them. But for some reason when you get close they make the slowest turns ever and it's like they let you pass. And when you do pass it's like they give up and fall back. I really don't get how I can chase a car for half a lap and then all of a sudden I'm 5 seconds ahead after passing them.
Click to expand...

This was done on purpose in GT5 because too many complain that the AI wouldn't give an inch. Now the AI will go out of it's way to let the player pass.
 
I don't feel like I'm adding anything else by stating how awful the AI is in this demo because it's not even a question mark.

The "world's best driving simulator" should not be so easy that someone who has never played a racing game in their lives could best the rest of the grid by ten full seconds after playing the game for ten or fifteen minutes. It's that bad.

I wondered when GT5 came out if they had simply pushed the AI issue aside, focusing on GT as a primarily online game.

I don't see why they can't base the AI driving styles off of actual people's laps, lines, and maneuvers rather than try as give it a brain. At least it would be somewhat competitive! Take the winners of the Nissan GT academy for example; base the highest difficulty toggle ( which yea, the game needs one!) off of those caliber gamers exact laps around individual tracks, and you've go a real challenge on your hands!

I've always lived Gran Turismo, but this has always been a big problem with the series.

I'll be as hold to say that if they cannot figure out the AI, I would rather the entire single player aspect be eliminated, and the game be purely online.
 
kendallgrubbs
.... if they cannot figure out the AI, I would rather the entire single player aspect be eliminated, and the game be purely online.
Click to expand...

Oh man, please don't say stuff like that. The offline career mode of any racing game should be of highest importance. Online players cannot, and should not be counted on to provide the solid racing experience in Gran Turismo. Many of us want to come home from work, fire up the ps3 and race our asses off without having to worry about the myriad of variables associated with getting/staying online (connection issues, connection speed of our network/opponents network, largely varying degrees of opponent skill/concern, time consumed by setting up races, etc).

A competitive A.I. with some lifelike attributes would take this thing to a whole new level. Also it would be REALLY nice if A.I. could be used to fill out a grid in online races. If me, my father, and two brothers could set up times to race each other online- what a difference it would make if the grid was a fully loaded 16 car funfest, compared to just the 4 of us on a big lonely track like Spa.


A proper implementation of solid A.I. would guarantee new GT fans for life.
 

Latest Posts

Back