Forza 5 [XO] *large pics inside*

[KongRudi]

Real Racing 3 for iOS and Android, did the same thing before - only there the drivatars were called Time Shifted Multiplayer (TSM), it recorded your friends on facebook's ingame lap-times, and had AI's drive at those times, instead of recording their ghosts.
The AI drove near perfect to hit the time set by your friends.

Driveatars will be good, because asynchroneus multiplayer have allways been good.
But personally I'd much rather have normal asynchroneus multiplayer, as we've seen in the various games such as Motorstorm: RC - and I assume the asynchroneus multiplayer will work the same in Drive Club, since the devs said RC were a good test for asynchroneus multiplayer - than this 'cloud ai' stuff, where you don't actually play you're friends, just an average assumption of them, a driveatar.
Sodium 2 (Project Velocity) also have it in PSHome if you want to test free, if any of your friends have played you can race against them.

With the driveatars, I see a major flaw, simply if you loose, it's because they're better in the game than you. If you win it's because the AI ain't good enough to learn all their tricks. :-/
With normal asynchroneus online, you'll race against your friends, but at a different time than him/her.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Real Racing 3 for iOS and Android, did the same thing before - only there the drivatars were called Time Shifted Multiplayer (TSM), it recorded your friends on facebook's ingame lap-times, and had AI's drive at those times, instead of recording their ghosts.
The AI drove near perfect to hit the time set by your friends.

Driveatars will be good, because asynchroneus multiplayer have allways been good.
But personally I'd much rather have normal asynchroneus multiplayer, as we've seen in the various games such as Motorstorm: RC - and I assume the asynchroneus multiplayer will work the same in Drive Club - than this 'cloud ai' stuff, where you don't actually play you're friends, just an average assumption of them, a driveatar.

With the driveatars, I see a major flaw, simply if you loose, it's because they're better in the game than you. If you win it's because the AI ain't good enough to learn all their tricks. :-/
With normal asynchroneus online, you'll race against your friends, but at a different time than him/her.

The problems with a recording of what your friend did, is that you then don't have to worry about your friend trying to crash into you. If you have a friend that likes to try to crash into people, then presumably their drivatar will do the same. If you have a friend that is good at avoiding contact, then their drivatar will presumably do the same. Does your friend try to block people when they try to pass? Does your friend allow people to pass rather than risking a collision? Does your friend like to draft and wait for an opportune part of the track before passing or do they just try to blast past you no matter where you are when they catch up? It will be far more like racing your friend than racing against their pre-recorded race if done well as a recording won't do any of those things in response to your presence on the track.

It remains to be seen how well the system can mimic/learn how various people drive.

Regards,
SB

 

[KongRudi]

I don't think all your races will be recorded, and analyzed.
It's explained here:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/drivatar/forza.aspx

It seems to be a 5 class course where you will drive to teach your AI how to drive certain curves, amongst other things.
And it will record it in 5 times, and see your improvements, during those courses.
After that it will give you a basis score, and how much you improved. And use that as a basis of how it learns, until you train it again.

It seems fun, but I hope they also include the option of actual asynchroneus play against your friends aswell.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

I don't think all your races will be recorded, and analyzed.
It's explained here:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/drivatar/forza.aspx

It seems to be a 5 class course where you will drive to teach your AI how to drive certain curves, amongst other things.
And it will record it in 5 times, and see your improvements, during those courses.
After that it will give you a basis score, and how much you improved. And use that as a basis of how it learns, until you train it again.

It seems fun, but I hope they also include the option of actual asynchroneus play against your friends aswell.

Thanks for the link that explains quite a bit. A summary.

When you create a Drivatar you must complete 5 tracks specially designed with every type of corner you may encounter in the game. Before you can use the Drivatar for anything, you must complete 3 laps on each of those tracks which gives your Drivatar a mature rating.

That then opens up Free Training and Head-to-Head.

Free training is where you can further refine your Drivatar by teaching it how you drive on any track you have unlocked as well as any car you have unlocked. Doing so will make it perform better on those tracks and in those cars than if you had not done that.

So, the initial 5 tracks are mandatory for your Drivatar to learn how you drive. You further refine that through Free Training at anytime that you wish.

Head-to-Head allows you to load Drivatars from an external device (they say friends Drivatars) to use in custom races.

What is unfortunate, is that it doesn't mention being able to race other Drivatars downloaded from the net. So that may or may not be possible. Would be a shame as that'd be a huge wasted opportunity.

Regards,
SB

 

[RenegadeRocks]

Funky, I honestly had never heard of it, go figure.




Think about how it would have to be done in a non cloud compute setup compared to a cloud compute setup.

There's a mountain of user data to process, with cloud compute the cloud servers churn through all the data on their own time and whenever the user plays a given track the game simply downloads the pre-computed data and off you go, you have custom ai ready to go every time you play.

In a non-cloud compute setup you have two choices:

One, you abandon the feature and don't support it at all instead sticking with traditional predictable bland ai.

Two, the game has to wait until the user selects a given track and starts to play it. Only then does the game know which set of ai data it needs to parse and process. After loading that track the game would have to collect all that user data from the internet connection and then it would have to create the ai routines on the spot. If could do this in two different ways, first it could create them before the user starts to play on the track but that would required putting up a "Please Wait" notice while the console downloads all the raw user ai data and parses it all, however long that would take. For all we know it could take minutes to download that raw data if the raw data set is very large, meaning a chunk of memory would have to be reserved for that. The other option is to let the user start playing the game with old predictable crappy ai routines and while they play in the background the game can download that mountain of ai data and reserve some memory and cpu time to parse it all to create the ai routines. So while you are racing around the track against typical canned ai the game is downloading data and crunching though it in the background using whatever memory and cpu cycles the console would have to spare. Once that is complete only then could it activate that ai and make it available to the player.

It may sound counter intuitive but yes indeed pre-processed cloud data can actually save a game real time processing power and memory.

Yes .....but then we could do it when the player is browsing the menus, when he is loading a game, when his console his idle, etc etc.

The easiest will be where the devs provide weekly optional updates with new Drivatars for the tracks.

We can think of many ways where getting those Drivatars doesn't require realtime hardware power. I think saying that having Drivatars on the cloud frees up processing power is pretty much stretching it a bit too much.The Drivatars are meant to be provided from a pool of data, like we get updates right now, since they depend on what others upload.

I understand that all game devs will sell their features, but we can filter what is and what is not. Drivatars are cool, just like Quake 3's self learning bots. It will be exciting to see how they behave versus normal racing AI.

 

[scooby_dooby]

...and yet no one has done it in the past 10 years, in the most connected console generation gaming has ever seen. I'm not pretending cloud is new, but subsidized servers of a consistent/predictable power configuration with default api support from day one all managed and supported by the platform owner is new and highly more conducive to being used by 3rd parties. "Could have been done" type arguments are useless because without proper backing, standardization and support all such arguments are a waste of time in the real world. That's why you've never seen ai farmed this way in a driving game today, yet will magically see it in a few more months from now.

Thats a pretty bold claim, unless you're speaking strictly in the racing genre. I'm sure many titles have aggregated player data, and used that data to generate new AI routines and then issue them to players via a patch or dlc.

And lets be honest. Turn 10 is doing it because they are owned by MS, and as 1st party it's their job to implement the marketing bullet points. Same reason we saw silly Kinect integration in Forza 4 that no one wanted.

And to cut to the real root of it, MS is only pushing "cloud" marketing, because their console is a little underpowered + they want to grow their Azure hosting service to match Amazon. It's a 2 for 1 in marketing terms.

This has very little to do with making better games, and offers nothing that hasn't already been totally feasible for most developers for years now.

I do appreciate the advancements they're pushing for the industry though, by pushing developers to think outside the box and embrace cloud computing. I just get a little sick to the stomach once it starts being used as some sort of differentiator between the platforms... at the end of the day, they're trying to sell you server space, and there's plenty of other competitors in that market.

 

[BRiT]

Thats a pretty bold claim, unless you're speaking strictly in the racing genre. I'm sure many titles have aggregated player data, and used that data to generate new AI routines and then issue them to players via a patch or dlc.

If you're so certain about it, then name at least 2 games which have aggregated player data and used it to generate new AI routines and redistributed it out via patch or dlc.

 

[expletive]

If you're so certain about it, then name at least 2 games which have aggregated player data and used it to generate new AI routines and redistributed it out via patch or dlc.

I'd add the condition "and not just to fix absolutely broken AI, but to provide ongoing refinements/enhancements to gameplay"

 

[scooby_dooby]

If you're so certain about it, then name at least 2 games which have aggregated player data and used it to generate new AI routines and redistributed it out via patch or dlc.

You realize there's over 1000 games released on iOS per day, and nearly all of them runs analytics (report data back to the server), and pushes frequent updates to their core gameplay (update AI routines?). It's clear that this sort of thing is happening all the time, as we speak. Obviously any AAA MMO title would do this sort of thing constantly. This is just common sense...

But hey, I love Forza, so I won't derail the thread about this awesome game any further. The AI has always been a strong point of the series, and I'm sure this cloud-sourced version will be the best iteration yet.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

You realize there's over 1000 games released on iOS per day, and nearly all of them runs analytics (report data back to the server), and pushes frequent updates to their core gameplay (update AI routines?). It's clear that this sort of thing is happening all the time, as we speak. Obviously any AAA MMO title would do this sort of thing constantly. This is just common sense...

All MMO's that I'm aware of have static AI. About the only time AI is adjusted is if after a period of months (sometimes weeks if it's close to launch) encounters are proving too difficult or too easy. And even then there is no adaptive AI. It's a static process of just adjusting parameters by hand. More or less health. Increase or decrease the rate at which an ability is used. Etc.

Nothing even remotely like what Turn 10 is doing with Drivatar AIs in the cloud.

Regards,
SB

 

[DrJay24]

Nothing even remotely like what Turn 10 is doing with Drivatar AIs in the cloud.

Have they actually said what they are doing? At this point I've just heard some buzzwords, reminiscent of the 'power of the Cell' from Sony in 2006. Have Turn 10 released any dev talks or behind the scenes stuff?

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Kongrudi linked to a page where the Drivatars are explained somewhat. When enabled you have to drive 5 specific courses with every "type" of corner in the game. That allows the AI to learn how you handle basic corners in the cars provided for those tracks.

The AI can then evolve over time by doing Free Training (any track, any car that you have unlocked for personal use). When doing that it'll learn how you drive in specific tracks as well as specific cars. As well, as your skill as a driver increases, you'll want to go to Free Trainining so that the AI can learn and evolve further to match your skills.

They obviously haven't revealed the actual calculations and code for what will be running in the cloud to examine how you do in potentially 100's of races in order to get the Drivatar to drive like you do. But they have said some of the things that are tracked for use. Things like when do you brake? How hard do you brake? You entry velocity and angle into curves. Your exit acceleration and direction. Etc.

It wouldn't be a stretch to think that it may be similar to (but obviously scaled down) from what Microsoft uses to analyze camera data in order to refine how accurately Kinect is with regards to skeletal tracking which requires a large server farm. Only instead of millions of photos and millions of potential ways any skeletal point could move in 3D space, a Drivatar only needs to work with a set amount of inputs relevant to driving on what is basically a 2D surface (the car can't leave the road after all).

Regards,
SB

 

[spraytech]

What view do you guys use when playing? I always use the front bumper view where all you see is the road. The sense of speed always seemed better to me.

 

[Arwin]

What view do you guys use when playing? I always use the front bumper view where all you see is the road. The sense of speed always seemed better to me.

Overall framerate is often better inthat view, as is visibility of the road. But if framerate is no problem (Forza 4 was fine) then I tend to stick to cockpit view.

 

[Cyan]

What view do you guys use when playing? I always use the front bumper view where all you see is the road. The sense of speed always seemed better to me.

Now that the windshield and stuff are properly simulated with realtime reflections and so on I am going to use the cockpit view 100% of the time (as long as the framerate is rock solid 60 fps!!).

I used the bonnet view most of the time in the past and the 3rd person view to admire a car's beauty.

If I switch to an ever single view I am going to use the fast rewind aid option just in case I crash, to learn it to perfection. I got a bit rusty after not playing racing games for a while.

 

[RenegadeRocks]

What view do you guys use when playing? I always use the front bumper view where all you see is the road. The sense of speed always seemed better to me.

I go for cockpit view if possible. Otherwise bumper view for a better view of the road in sims. In arade racers I am always in the third person view, where u can see the full car, cos arcadey racers are much more hectic and cockpit view doesn't give u enough peripheral vision.

 

[Cyan]

Forza Motorsport 5 Limited Edition includes a VIP membership and 13 bonus cars, along with 3 car packs, special window decals and reward acceleration.

There is a Day One Edition too featuring a single car pack, a Day-one themed livery and custom tuning package.

http://www.vg247.com/2013/08/15/forza-5-limited-day-one-editions-revealed-for-xbox-one-details-here/

 

[Cyan]

Finally! Turn 10 have announced that Forza 5 will include Spa Francorchamps /along with Laguna Seca and others/ at launch, which is great news, imho. I loved GRID just to be able to play this track alone.

http://gematsu.com/2013/08/forza-5-adds-laguna-seca-spa-francorchamps-tracks

 

[Cyan]

New pictures. : D

And a new gameplay video, still hot off the press.

 

[kots]

Still no self-shadowing except the driver's car ....