Help needed with AI configuration

Hello everybody,

As the title says, I look for some help to configure the AI behaviour, especially the suspension, for the car I'm working on now. Look at the pictures below :

Here is how the car behaves when I'm behind the wheel, and this is how the car should more or less behave...





And here is what happens when the AI drives. It's completely unrealistic, the car has almost no body roll, the suspension seems to be soft vertically as it has correct travel up and down, but looks very hard laterally...





I've worked on these settings in the HDC :

AIEvenSuspension=1.0            // averages out spring and damper rates to improve stability (0.0 - 1.0)
AISpringRate=1.0              // spring rate adjustment for AI physics (improves stability)
AIDamperSlow=0.5              // contribution of average slow damper into simple AI damper
AIDamperFast=0.5                // contribution of average fast damper into simple AI damper
AIDownforceZArm=0.0           // hard-coded center-of-pressure offset from vehicle CG
AIDownforceBias=0.0             // bias between setup and hard-coded value (0.0-1.0)
AITorqueStab=(1.0, 1.0, 1.0)   // torque adjustment to keep AI stable

I've tried dozens and dozens of variations, got some crazy results like the car bouncing everywhere or moving below the road, but I never managed to get something approaching the non-AI behaviour of the car.

Any suggestion is welcome. I'd really like to get a visually better AI as the races in the Gordini Cup were very spectacular, but in game they look rather lame for the moment.

Have you tried increasing the AIMinPassesPerTick setting also found in the .hdc file? It's supposed to make the AI to use more accurate spring/damper/torque values.

bonnier wrote:

Have you tried increasing the AIMinPassesPerTick setting also found in the .hdc file? It's supposed to make the AI to use more accurate spring/damper/torque values.

Yes, I tried that also but it didn't make any difference.

The problem really seems to be in the suspension settings. See those pics :




When the car gets under AI control the wheels get pushed down harder (well, up when the car's upside down).

You must have something the wrong way around or maybe a minus sign in the wrong place etc...

GeeDee wrote:

You must have something the wrong way around or maybe a minus sign in the wrong place etc...

Since I've tried to change almost everything and it remains the same, it's surely something like that. I'll try to rewrite completely the HDC and SP files to see what happens...

Pick a car of similar size that works the way you want and copy the settings to the Renault.
Does the original car behave as shown above or only after you have altered its settings ?

fatguts wrote:

Pick a car of similar size that works the way you want and copy the settings to the Renault.
Does the original car behave as shown above or only after you have altered its settings ?

Before editing make a back up but you already know that
As fatguts says, pick something similar and put the two HDC's side by side* I often compare two HDC's and look for what might be wrong, I found the Aston Martin DB4GT always calling me to "cool brakes" even when I was in the pit lane on my way out, I found that iirr, the Fade and Optimum temperatures seemed to be the wrong way round... no offence 'Team'
But, by comparing it with the HDC of other big GT cars I was able to spot the apparent error.


* There may be settings not covered in the comparison HDC so at first ignore them and just look to what you can compare.

Yes, that's why I'll rewrite the HDC. Take one from an original car and modify each entry to fit the R12 specificities. Doing so I might find out if something was wrong to begin with, inverted entries or missing characters like - or , that are easy to miss, or even worse, a carriage return that is invisible in the file but that do some damage sometimes.