yeah, acc/dec can be a lot in case of this particular track, which is the smallest one in the game at the moment, but i have to keep in mind that the game can be played even faster due to other mechanics like drift boosting and hopping to keep momentum (like in the pinned ex-WR video by Danizk0), so dec at the very least should be pretty reactive to player input i think… there are also other tracks like Star Farewell and Gray City, those are quite big and you have more steering freedom.
mentioning the ai, it totally does make decisions, but it makes them while also targeting the points it gets from a track’s 3d curve. what they do is basically “driving along this line this way” while “avoiding any collisions”. the way i see them not sticking to the roadline is by giving them some sort of an off-center threshold they shouldn’t pass instead.. which i actually tried to do while making the game, but couldn’t make sense of curve width properties and other stuff.
that’s the demo of an early prototype of those AIs, when they were only driving forward and avoiding collisions, instead of sticking to a specific path. they could jump over pits nicely too. while they really do steer freely and mostly don’t mash into walls (in the current state of the game this wouldn’t even be a big problem, because mashing into one softly turns you to the side you need to drive to instead of just stopping you like in the video), all of them are driving different ways.
during the making of this reply, i actually remembered that the next target point is taken by length of the curve in 3d space instead of 2d, so when they jump off the ramp they’re actually getting further from it, so the top-view 2d projection which is used for steering and acc/dec in AIs is actually getting less length than the side-view one and thus they slow down… which is also fixable by switching to a threshold instead? i should try that next time i get to this game, i guess
thank you for your review :-)
edit: this demo is also nice, they’re smarter there (ai is playing) :p