Race tracks, AI, Waypoints, but no real races?

So, I've been wondering something recently as the development of this game goes on: There are now three proper race tracks in the game, many of the cars have a race variation of them, there has long since been support for waypoints, the AI is advanced enough to at least give somewhat of a challenge if you are in a lower-spec'd car then your opponent, and to top it all out, there has been at least mod involving a one six-car race using race-spec cars on one of the racetracks (and that broke years ago after not being kept up to date).

So why aren't there any AI races on racetracks in the vanilla game? I get that the apps to properly support races (e.g. your position in the race) may not necessarily function yet, but that shouldn't be a difficult problem to solve. Everything seems to be in-place to allow for something like a "quick race" option in the main menu, but we don't have that, and I don't understand what is holding the devs back from pushing that through development.

 

One of the biggest problems is not the ai programming as seen by these 2 post. https://www.beamng.com/threads/ai-work.54961/ https://www.beamng.com/threads/ai-work-2.54965/. The current thing that is holding back racing is the performance problems the game has. Currently there are only 2 scenarios that have multi car racing with the ai. This is probably why and the fact the ai is still a bit stupid.

 

I thought about that, and two things came to mind:
1. The devs are confident enough about the game's performance that there is a 5 car race in the game as it stands now, which isn't terrible for a race.
2. The settings for the races could include a slider for the AI from 0 (e.g. a personal time trial) to say 12, so the player can choose how taxing they want to make the race.

True, but it is good enough that the devs are confident enough to have races, even if they aren't using the highest tiers of cars.

 

I would love to have proper sim racing in BeamNG, but I wonder if there is much of a demand for it. It seems like more people like to wreck cars than race. I have no idea what the actual numbers are obviously, I'm basing this on YouTube and forum postings.

What I like about BeamNG is how it offers a more realistic take on stunt driving, off road driving, and unrealistic scenarios. I started to try road racing to check out the tracks, which are really cool. The Automation track is awesome. Some of the track cars are also really fun. So the potential for great sim racing is there, but is it worthwhile to develop?

 

That without cheating part is why I love BeamNG, but ndx please make sure to check office at Germany from time to time, because if there are something like below, you need to send someone there with a fireman's axe before it is too late


AI indeed is a challenge, but there has been lot of development and research during last 10 years on the subject and rise of robotics is constantly pushing new innovations to AI development, so I'm quite confident team will find solutions to challenges of AI development, but of course it will take time.

 

There sure are some fans of racing here and in Beam.NG in general. There have been groups for time trials, Rally Championships (I miss those ), clean driving etc.
Let's hope for the next steps in AI-development to make it a challenging race opponent. Scenarios will be the easiest thing to produce after that

 

We had a fun time setting up the races for Road Atlanta, but yeah, it's a challenge to find ways around the limitations.

Specifically, they slow down over every waypoint, even if they are perfectly parallel. That's why straight-line speed suffers. RA has a slight bend to it's straightaway so I had to add over a dozen points, meaning they never gained momentum. I've been using its back straightaway as a benchmark for inefficiency every update.