I'll clear it up for those of you crying over it. Yes, the game is coming out, and yes, Firemint is still hard at work developing the game right now. I don't know if I'm supposed to be saying this, but a hands-on with the game wasn't out of the question when Firemint invited me to their Melbourne office. Take it for what it's worth.
Dumb post. Really dumb post. As a gamer you should always be happy with delays to improve game quality and to get a game closer to a way a dev wants to ship it rather than hitting some arbitrary release date . I don't care when they release it and I hope they take as long as they need to feel comfortable with what they are releasing. This is hardly a Duke Nukem Forever situation here.
you mean you're comfy with a 'rushed-in' app full of bugs, which will be fixed later with an update? :S .. you surprize me dude, seriously its obvious that they aren't rushing the title, and taking their time (im glad) to polish it before releasing ... coz its a pretty hyped up title, and disappointing their fans is the last thing they want. SO give 'em a break will ya?
Hi all, In our last major post we talked about some of the reasons for delay. There are always more things to polish of course, but I thought I would let you know a little more detail on one of the big things that has proven more unpredictable than we had hoped...the AI. I touched on this last time, but basically, our AI now plays with exactly the same limitations as the player. This is one of our design values. Real Racing is about driver Vs driver like a real race. Obviously there are varying levels of difficulty so the AI dont start out so smart, but ultimately at the highest difficulty we wanted the AI to be able to challenge our QA Manager in a fair race (no mean feat). So to achieve our vision we chose to use Genetic Algorithms to train the AI in a similar way to how a human learns. For those of us who arent a programming genius, genetic algorithms use survival of the fittest model to evolve AI, rather than just programming it directly. What is great about genetic algorithms (GA) is that they produce AI that is much smarter, but also more human like. What isnt so good (as we have discovered) is that just like good human players, they misbehave and find exploits. So here are a few interesting things that have happened that ended up costing me money and delaying the game (I am hoping I can laugh about this later if the game sells well ;-) ): The first thing the AI started doing was exploiting the rigid body collision system to get them around the corners faster. They would hit some of the corners at full speed, spin out so that they were facing in the right direction and then slam into the wall fast enough to get out of the corner with a favorable bounce. So we had to address this. Then they started cutting corners over the grass because it didnt really impact them negatively enough. So we tweaked this to slow you down ..guess what they started doing then? . They would deliberately hit the grass on certain corners which would act to provide optimum braking for that corner, and get them around faster than sticking on the road. We seem to have fixed this now, but it was about getting the grass to behave appropriately. We have been addressing these issues as well as other more mundane ones, but it has taken time. The interesting thing is that these are the same exploits that human players could use, so in a way the AI training system has been acting like a massive beta testing team. Anyway, yes, Real Racing is still going to come out, and we do hope you all enjoy it. This may give you some taste of the sometimes unpredictable problems that we encounter during development. Rob (CEO of Firemint)
It has taken time, past tense, so the issues HAVE been addressed and the game has maybe already been submitted! Excellent news!!!! (As he empties the bottle of extra virgin olive oil over the pan of patience that had evaporated and was beginning to burn) Thanks a lot for sharing Rob, I appreciate that you have been trying to make this game different from any other driving game out there from the word go and that you are sticking to your model. This is not a wait for ANOTHER driving game, this is a wait for RR! I'll wait!
OK guys,you convinced me it is better to let firmint improve the game than having a half version(but even a half version of rr would be awesome!) so i'll buy it
Thanks for your support. Just to clarify, Firemint Real Racing has not been submitted. I cannot say anything about timing because I felt it was close a month ago also. And that doesn't necessarily mean it is going to take another month. It just means, I really can't say, I can't know for sure and I don't want to risk dissapointing people who are waiting for it again by speculating. It's hard to say nothing while trying to say something . Rob
Just try not to over analyse it, look at the AI of the first GT games on psx/ps2 systems they were really bad and still the game sold buckets. And remember its a iphone game how many people will expect high realism on a device which only seem to sell stick wars and flight control , kinda games.
As much as I'm looking forward to the release of this game, I very much appreciate the feedback you've provided regarding the "difficulties" in the AI programming. A very interesting read and I know look more forward to the release of Real Racing!
I love it! Reminds me of how the crowd AI used by the armies in the Lord of The Rings films originally led the humans fighters to run away because the armies of Mordor were so big. That may have been a rumour but a good one none-the-less. Smarter AI makes you realise the lack of realism involved in games, movies etc.
Thats interesting about the genetic algorithms you're using to "teach" the AI. Quite funny how it finds the flaws and uses them to win... One question about this system - can it learn from the player and adapt to their style? For example, if I was to take a particular racing line that was better than the AI opponents, would the AI learn from this and start using that same line? That would be pretty cool!
the AI is just going to be amazing! Rob, the descriptions you gave about the AI learning from it's mistakes sounds totally awesome! I'm even more impressed by this feat than anything else. I haven't heard of another company trying as hard as Firemint to ensure the AI is that good. I would rather you take more time to iron out these issues and do more testing than release anything rightnow. Especially if you intend to have online leaderboards etc from the first release. If my experience of the so-called "MMO" games like iMafia have taught me, is that online games need to be thoroughly tested and thought out before hitting online, otherwise players will be so p!ssed off with any exploits and that may not play, or give negative information about the game. I want this to succeed and I'm willingto be patient for t. You can even charge a higher price: I'm willing to reward hard work
hahaha I like how the AI's roll Reminds me of a psp racing game where all the AI's followed you and if you crashed they'd all crash into the same thing xD
