Re: [TuxKart-devel] Ideas for AI

[Ingo R. <gr...@gm...>]

Charles Goodwin <ch...@ve...> writes:

> I really don't like the idea of relative speeds according to how
> well or not somebody is playing. Not only does that cause problems
> for players (they approach the same corner at full speed in two
> parts of the race, only full speed has changed), it's also a
> challenge for the AI (same corner problem).

I consider automatic handicap adjustment basically the best invention
since sliced bread in game development and its really the only way to
get interesting gameplay. Without it you either end up far behind
everybody else or far ahead of everybody else, none of this is any
fun. With automatic handicap adjustment however you get quite exciting
races and very often races where the last few meters matter. 

It doesn't cause any problems for the player, since the player drives
always the same (unless you do multiplayer with enabled auto-handicap
of course), only the AI changes its speed and the number of bonuses it
uses. The only thing that one needs to keep care of are upper and
lower bounds for how much the AI gets slow down or speed up, else you
get easily unrealistic situations where the AI almost halts or drives
insanly fast (this bug is currently triggerable in Tuxkart). So
handicap ranges might look like this:

Speed:   0...........100%
Easy:         [----]
Medium:          [---]
Hard:                [-]

Thus ensuring that easy always stays easy and adopts to any kind of
weak player, medium always provides a good chalange for the average
player and on hard people are really forced to not make much mistakes,
since the hanticap won't get adjusted much at all.

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