Reiza Studios has released its monthly development update – it coinsidentally did not do so last month – and discusses what is going on in the final stages of Automobilista development.
Version 1.4
As promised before, Reiza moved a lot of focus to the AI. The team came up with five points it wanted to focus on – “Performance, Awareness, Strategy, Behavior & Personality” – and used these to find the weaknesses of the current AI.
This lead to the improvement of the AI’s pit strategy by improving its tyre-wear, adding “customized tire wear thresholds” and by adding a “lock for AI refuelling in series where they aren’t allowed to.”
The AI’s on-track behaviour has been improved as well and it now obeys to blue flags for example.
Awareness was also a part of the improvements, as this video shows:
If you were wondering what the “personality” point above is about, here’s the answer:
To make the AI more convincing but also less “robotic”, Reiza has given AI drivers a personality in form of a RCD file, which determines “how they perform in starts, manage their tires and how cooperative they are reacting to blue flags”.
A lot more technical changes have probably taken place too, but that would exceed the capacities of a short and crisp development blog.
Version 1.4 is already available.
Version 1.5
More AI improvements will be added of course, but one of the main features to hopefully arrive in time is surround sound. Currently, Reiza is still unsure whether the feature will make the 1.5 release.
Although the Formula Ultimate has already been released, there is still some work left to be done. The ERS systems still needs to be fully implemented. They are functional right now, but the car’s battery is running at 100% all the time, which is not the way it should be.
Steam achievements were already promised for 1.4 and did not quite make it. They will most likely release during next week as a small update.
More of those smaller updates are supposed to follow until the full 1.5 release is ready.
The future
Apart from adding more content, Reiza is doing its best to update older content to current standards and thereby improve the overall experience Automobilista delivers.
As ever, Reiza cannot go into too much detail regarding the upcoming content.
However:
- “2 more (free) tracks, 1 semi-new series, and DLC packages” are set for release in the coming months.
- One of the tracks will be Ibarra a.k.a. Yahuarcocha, “a picturesque old-style circuit in Ecuador.”
We do not know anything about the Automobilista successor yet, in fact, Reiza does not either, it seems:
It´s actually getting a bit tricky to share many details about what we´re doing in these final stages of AMS development as we´re getting more into exploring new grounds and doing some experimenting without knowing for sure what will pan out and how soon – that naturally makes it harder to provide much of a foresight without feeding expectations that may not be realistic on the short term.
Anyhow, for the coming months, Automobilista is still taken care of very well!