Weekly Update #18 - The Machine Revolution Begins

Drift on, drift 'til you drop, be the envy of Glandeen the Drift Pig himself.

Introducing the most sophisticated drift racing AI ever developed, coming straight to you in Alpha v0.8! This one has been in the works for quite a while now, and finally it has paid off. This drift model uses no neural nets, prerecorded inputs, or any other trickery - to bring you an unparalleled single player racing experience! It has been designed using a simple state machine and just a smidge of calculus.

Why build it this way? Since it's a pure mathematical driving model, it isn't overfitted to any given training data, and can tackle any line given to it with precision and speed! It's been a long week so we're saving the big technical write-up for next week, continue to keep your eyes peeled for that!

It's available in the latest v0.8 to play now, so give it a go! My challenge to you is to take a stock AE86 to the Circuit track, and try your best to come first! It took me many attempts to beat it just once.

Once again, we're likely going to be doing some contract work over the next few weeks, and when that isn't happening, finalising FUNG Chapter 2 will be the focus.

Drift King - Changelog:

• All new drift AI!
• Traffic path generation improved, now includes intersection pathing (no longer just paths linearly directly to the intersection endpoint)
• Resize terrain textures and fix filtering
• Vehicle LoDs, to support more vehicles in the world at a time
• Prevent bot traffic using very rare paints
• Add track path back to minimap in races
• Improve tree LoDs
• Improve rewind performance (should no longer cause frame drops)
• Turn off map markers for AI traffic (now only racers and other human players show on the map)

Happy drifting!

- George