AI Behaviour Feedback Thread - FUEL: REFUELED mod for FUEL

I've noticed a strange situation: sometimes, AI almost stops during the race, like waiting for something. It looks like if they were trying to even their time with some specified results.

Atm I've only tried The Leap of Faith and Lakeside Run races. In the first one I wasn't able to run first (Sludgeday motorbike is quite slow), but right in front of finish (~100m left) everybody except of first one stopped. In the Lakeside run I've noticed the same behavior - I barely made a lead of 20m, but when the distance to the finish was about 1km, I've noticed that everybody is far behind and the distance is increasing very fast: 100m, 200m, 400m, 600m... that was particularly strange since AI on the 300-400m+ distance is usually VERY fast and almost impossible to leave behind or come up with (probably because world geometry on such distance from the player is a lot more simple and nothing like trees is stopping them to drive at top speed).

This situation is more likely to appear on easier difficulty levels, and it's not repeating in the same place with the same drivers.

It's not breaking the game, but, ehm, it's strange. Also, I can't really remember if there was such an issue in the original game, because it was easy not to notice AI while driving far ahead ( ) - so maybe the problem isn't related to the mod.

Edited by: bac9

I think its more of a game-wide issue, the AI is especially poor in FUEL. If I only include about 4 AI opponents the ai works better... (all the new challenges I've made do not have more than 4 ai) any more than that and the AI doesn't work properly... it either dashes off ahead or just stops and lets you win. So its a choice between having 4 AI opponents (rather than 9 or more) to get improved ai.

It is strange, but I'd like to get at the ai related code and fix it - I presume its in the .exe file considering there is nothing in any of the plain text files.

Vetron wrote: it either dashes off ahead or just stops and lets you win.

Oh yeah, just the case

Edited by: bac9

bac9-flcl wrote: Oh yeah

Img.gameru.net

lol I guess the AI drivers felt bad and decided to let you win

*adds AI to the extensive list of things to improve in this game*

I'll take a look through the decompiled .exe file sometime and see what ai related code is in it, I'm still looking for ways to bypass that silly GFWL checksum thingy though.

Take into account I'm no coder or modder, just a player with a lot of single player time on Fuel, so everything here might not be accurate at all to how the AI really works. It's based entirely on my observations of what the AI seems to do.

I recall the original game's AI would do that slow down too. It seems they have a set time to aim for on each difficulty, because if you let them finish, regardless of how perfect a run they did, their times are always around 2-3 seconds off from an "average finishing time".

They also will "cheat" a bit if they need to speed up to hit their time. This is especally noticable in the later races in the game, where the cliffside dirt roads shouldn't let muscle cars go very fast around corners, but the AI seems to have a very lucky run every single time. (It's actually so that they can keep up with you taking smart shortcuts down the mountainside or cutting hairpin turns, not because the designers of fuel wanted to taunt you. I know, because I've still managed to finish most of those races even without perfect clean runs, simply by planning a good route that doesn't follow the AI traffic.)

I should also note that the AI that is "cheating" or "slowing down" this way is almost always limited to the current race leader. The others seem to be limited by the car physics at all times(though they still slow down if they would beat the designated leader in the end of the race).

It's not as noticable in the original game, but what probably happened to make it noticable here is that the mod changed the way the cars handled. The AI seems to use a mix of "playing fair", using the physics to drive around, and "OMG I need to 'cheat' a little to keep my time". So in the new mod, they are using the improved car control to go faster, and then going "whoops, I'm way too fast to be a fair challenge" near the end of the race (I've seen it mid race as well).

Personally, I like the fact the AI plays fair, even if it seems a bit cheap to win at times.

I'm more concerned about the races(mostly challenges so far) where the AI in this mod seems to be aiming for impossible par times, and "cheating" their way 1000-3000 ahead of the rest of the group(the player and other "non cheating" AIs). I'm not sure if you can change their "par times" or if it's somehow precalculated for each race route, but some of the challenges right now are basically rendered impossible because of this.

I've been looking at some values and seeing what result I can get - one interesting result is this:

Line: AddMissionTime "(1481)road:7:6km" 250 0 0 NONE

At first I belived this was 'mission times' i.e. checkpoints and such (the last values are in fact this). However the first value changes from race-to-race, even when there is no timing mechanism. Changing the "250" to "10000" had a funny effect... the cars drove 100m and stopped and wouldn't move any further. The opposite could be said when I set the value to -10000, the cars rocketed off insanely fast and didn't stop for anything lol (i.e. many kilometers ahead of the player before the race ended)

So thats something interesting, obviously this is the distance mechanism to which sets how far an AI can be from the player before they are stopped - I'm not sure what unit the value is supposed to represent (smaller is greater distance...).