I guess these are two separate suggestions, but I thought it better to not make two separate threads because they're rather closely related. The first would be an AI mode, like "Chase me!" and whatnot, but with a slight twist: In this mode, the would AI try to race the player in an aimless fashion. Essentially, it would do so by having two sub-modes: Chasing and Leading. When the AI considers itself behind, it would try to pass the player. If it manages to do so, it switches to Leading mode, at which point it just goes wherever the hell it wants, not too unlike when it's in "Flee!" mode. If the player overtakes it again, it would return to Chasing mode of course. When in doubt, (for example if the player and AI are across the map from each-other, or someone takes the wrong turn somewhere), the AI would default to chasing mode. You can in fact have a facsimile of this in the current game, if you set the AI to Flee, then pause the game and set it to Chase when you overtake it, so that it doesn't run off. Of course, the problem is that the Chase AI does slightly want to kill you. It would be even better if this AI mode could somehow coordinate between multiple AI cars, so that you could have more than a two-horse race. However, I think it would be pretty hard to determine who's in the lead in this case, for both the player and AI. Perhaps this wouldn't be worth the effort. A related thing could be a "Custom Race" system, accessed by clicking an icon on the map screen. Once selected, the player could then place one or more checkpoints on the map and choose from a couple of settings: Mode: Race: Turns your race into a sort of pseudo-mission with a starting countdown and everything. Cruise: The game remains in Freeroam mode. Rather than create a true race, it just makes the AI follow the checkpoints in an infinite loop, or if there's only one, drive to that point in a sporty fashion. Consider this a sort of "track day" mode, just not necessarily on a race track. I think it would be fun to have a bunch of AI driving around a loop quickly that you can just try to overtake (or ram off the road) at your leisure. Lap Count: This setting would be greyed out if there's only one checkpoint or Cruise Mode is selected. Display Checkpoints: Cruise-only setting. All it would do is toggle whether the player can see the checkpoints, because they may or may not really be relevant in this mode. In any case, once the Start button is clicked, all non-traffic vehicles would be reset where they stand and turned into race participants, and the countdown would start if applicable. This means that vehicles would just start from wherever they were when the player opened the map screen. Ideally, there would also be a "save checkpoints" function, so you could rerun and share your favourite races. I'm not sure if the cars/starting locations should be saved as well. Could be cool, but it could also cause trouble if you want to load an old race with cars that are now incompatible, for example. It also sounds like a good way to introduce bugs. From what I understand there's a lot of fiddling with the AI going on in the real AI race missions, so the AI's racing lines and whatnot would be far from ideal if they just follow checkpoints like this. However, the player could perhaps offset this by giving the AI better cars. Sadly that wouldn't really fix the AI's suicidal tendencies. Either way, I think both would be very fun and just give you a lot more stuff to do.
