AI Investigation - Stunts / 4D Sports Driving - ADG Pro 16
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 9 ต.ค. 2020
- Just because no one uses the AI doesn't mean it's irrelevant!
For today's Ancient DOS Games Pro video, Gemini's going back to Stunts, aka 4D Sports Driving, to investigate the six AI drivers to see what exactly is up with them and if their driving skills match up with the descriptions they've been given, with some... "mildly amusing" results to be sure!
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Additional Information and Corrections:
* A couple minor discrepancies I missed while voicing this video: When I first started doing the testing, instead of crashing out I was just looping around and doing a full-penalty finish, but when I realized the AI drivers had to dodge my car at the finish line I started going for crashes out of the way instead. Also, the last test with the elevated roads does NOT have a hill on the non-elevated track. I forgot I had removed that hill for that test because it didn't make sense to keep it in. :P
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This game is so heavily underrated, despite its huge influence.
How is it "heavily underrated"?
Incredible that still people are discover new things in this game.
This is still one of the best racing games ever made imo.
Finally, some Stunts content! Seems like no one talks about the game despite it seeming like a big deal when I played it back in the day
You say "finally" but this is my THIRD proper video on the thing. ;)
@@Pixelmusement Fair point, but it still seems a bit under-examined. I've never been able to find much about it's history, particularly any developer interviews.
@@deanlillie7140 Come over to the forums on forum.stunts.hu/ ! We're interviewing the sound developer soon.
@@Pixelmusement What are those videos can i ask? I cannot find it.
@@sebastianaliandkulche Search my channel specifically for "stunts" and several videos should come up, including Episode ONE of Ancient DOS Games! (Stunts was the very first game I covered almost 12 years ago!)
I once had a savegame where I raced against the computer. Drove on a ramp, the opponent sped past me and I landed on him. My car stayed on the opponents car for the whole race, and when he crossed the finish line I was declared winner.
I found the disk it was saved to at my parents attic a few years ago, but the data was unfortualtely unrecoverable. God, what I would give to get that file back again...
...you may want to watch this much older video of mine if you haven't already... ;) th-cam.com/video/H7W-RX2pGK4/w-d-xo.html
Pixelmusement OMG, I had, in fact, not seen that video before. Thanks, these were hilarious.
Stunts was epic for the era.
Man, this video is AMAZING! I love this game and always thought that the AI was a little messed about the profiles of the rivals. Although is all about time while racing, I really like to have this competitors, and my rivalry against Sid Vicious... Ahem, sorry, "Skid" Vicious, was almost personal ;-D
Never even imagined a comparison and tests like this. Just WOW, super thank you!
_Kris while building a course:_ "Oops! All Corners!"
I have one in the track pack on my website that's basically oops all crossroads. It's BORING AS HECK to legitimately complete. :P
Nice call, Cap'n Crunch...
I used to play this one a lot. One nice thing is that it didn't matter what your CPU speed was. Run it on a high speed CPU (In dos) and it would just get smooth as glass and not run too fast. I think it got it's timing from the clock instead of delay statements.
The interrupt timer normally runs at a rate of 18.2 seconds. It is trivially easy to adjust this to whatever you want once you know how; A change to 20 seconds is barely going to cut into system performance at all and can be used for timing out a 20 FPS game. :B
When the robot uprising occurs, they'll be coming for me because of the many hours I've spent designing tracks to make the AI crash, while I sat back and laughed.
Thanks for taking the time to give me some inside info if I ever see Cherry's AI...
EDIT: I see you've made another video on this beloved game I was obsessed with, Subscribed!
A driving simulator with even worse AI is "Fahr-Simulator 2009". I made plenty of videos about its absurd glitches. See "crash race to city" and "asphalt dive through highway bridge " how terrible its opponent AI ist.
@@cyberyogicowindler2448 ha, sounds right up my alley. I'll have to take a look.
This was actually quite good content. So very weird to compare ai this exhaustively for a 30 year old game, but surprisingly enjoyable to watch.
Even nostalgia is worthy of unnecessarily in-depth investigations! ;)
This video is interesting. I have played this game for many hours, have many of the addons including one even faster car than the fastest, and player generated content such as maps (searched high and low) and have calculated almost everything you display in this video. I think it's great that you have documented it in a video, it takes it from my having amateur yet reasonably accurate observations, to you having a scientific record of the anomalies. Well done, hat's off to you for pulling it apart and putting back together again.
I could watch you narrate Stunts videos all day long, man.
I can absolutely attest to witnessing Helen deliberately ramming into the player car on a handful of occasions. So her trait of "liking bumper cars" does seem to be an actual factor...
Perhaps, but I can attest to other opponents doing the same thing from my own experience. The AI TRIES to dodge the player, but has a very rudimentary way of figuring it out which fails frequently. :P
Helen can ram into me any time she wants
I think it's more that Otto has trouble with up-and-down tracks than track height. (Slower climbing hills, and will slow down to avoid getting airborne if it's not a required jump.)
Yeah, I'd like to see an elevation test where the road changes elevation. In these tests the car's elevation remained the same, it's just the terrain descended into a valley beneath the flat track at various points.
Holy moly that brings back some memories.
I remember if you could get the fast car up to 255 MPH, it would get stuck at 255 MPH. At that point you could go anywhere, even off road, with no speed penalty.
Ironically though, due to how the physics work, you can't make a three-tile-wide jump at that speed; You have to slow down slightly right before such a jump to clear it! :B
You know a video is good when you have never played the game but watch it all anyway. Nice job!
Whoa, you never played Stunts? You're in for a treat!
Used to play this for hours after school. I really enjoyed making my custom tracks a lot.
Helen: "likes bumper car". It sounds like a wife joke 🤣
Can't help thinking that there's probably some sexual joke in there.
This game should get an HD remake!
There's been attempts though none of them have ever gone anywhere meaningful. Doesn't help that the source code was lost to time. :/
I think it would be better a reverse engineering PC port so it gets widescreen support.
There are Stunts remake projects on the stunts o hu forum. I wrote in it much about the inner working of "Hard Drivin" and "Race Drivin", their glitches and version differences.
Always loved that you could continue a race mid-replay. Great video too, Kris!
I remember explicitly trying to find ways to make the AI crash when I played the game as a kid. Uphill and then immediately three consecutive short jumps was the easiest way and it worked for all drivers and all but the slowest cars.
7:48--One thing I noticed about Skid is that unless he KNOWS he can win, he either crashes out or drives his car into the lake--on purpose.
Very interesting analysis. This game was a childhood favorite. I used to call Otto and Skids "Bulk and Skull" because they kinda reminded me of those characters from Power Rangers.
I noticed already as a kid that Otto is typically a much faster driver than many others, but I never figured out why.
You should do the AI from Carmageddon II, it's pretty amazing all the tricks it uses.
HAHAHA!! good analysis of this golden old game, i love it! Good work.😁
Love this comparison!
Awesome video! By the way, AI driver's speed limits at each element of the road are listed in the program Opponent blaster. It is possible to change the data via this utility. For example, you can set even 200 mph at the icy sharp corner for Bernie, but probably he would crash. Or make Helen and Cherry the best drivers, faster than Skid. Maybe you can make a video about how different settings changes would influence the opponent's performance.
I can safely say this video has become a favourite of mine, it's just the case of "i wasn't looking for this, but i found it" video.
Note: Glad my humble friend "Herr Otto Parz" is the second favourite on the races, his responses are much more satisfying and he openly welcomes defeat offering a retry, even though i know AI doesn't abide but the player physics for driving, i'd have checked if the AI have different proficiencies depending on the cars (for example Helen Wheels using a cheap car instead of the Indy?).
Since the AI is not playing by the game's proper physics model and different cars didn't seem to affect relative speeds but rather maximum speeds and acceleration, I don't think trying a range of cars would've made any significant differences. They way to test that would be to put a couple slaloms right in front of a sharp 180-degree ice turn, then take an AI, put them in different vehicles, and measure how long it takes them to complete that turn in each vehicle. I suspect for each AI driver the time taken to complete the turn would be the same between all vehicles for them. :P
oh man, the memories... and the track creator was fun too
Nice Video. I played SO MUCH Stunts as a child. :)
Ooh, I think I know what the game is!
Realms of The Haunting!
About 15 years ago, I found out how to see and change performance “values” for the cars. Power, handling, gearing etc. I don’t recall, but I’d bet there was a way to see and change values on the Drivers as well.
one of my childhood games
Quite enjoyed the exploration - I expected the AI was going to rely on pathing, but the variance between their described behaviours and the results? I didn't expect that at all.
love this. but maybe faulty assumption at 3:15 ish, that the computer opps ( not calling them AI lol ) can be stacked that linear. there was some more stuff into the rudimentary physics in the game that may lead to such results, obstacles like loops etc.
Good analysis. I know there is a table with maximum AI speeds somewhere on the internet, so it isn't really a secret. These speeds are car-independent, so, for example, Skid Vicious is capable of cornering faster in most road cars than the human player can do, but the human player can corner much faster in the race cars. Also, the AI can slow down much faster than the human player, as demonstrated by that sharp-corner track. About the ranking of the drivers: when I started playing the game I thought the drivers might be ranked from bad to worse, but I quickly found out this isn't the case. Skid Vicious is the best driver by far. Otto and Joe are reasonably good at cornering, but Joe is slow on the straights (how difficult is it to press the accelerator?). Hell on Wheels isn't particularly good at anything, Bernie is bad at anything and Cherry is insanely bad at cornering, so I always considered her the weakest opponent.
About the way the AI are simulated: in case there are several paths, they don't necessarily take the same path all the time. There must be some sort of shortest-path algorithm, but if the AI continues to crash in one route, it may take another route. Also, sometimes they take a different route in the replay than in the actual race, which usually completely messes up the replay of course.
On many custom tracks with jump ramps, the AI seems to crash always, which feels like getting cheated. I mainly tried Skid Vicious because the rest is slow anyway. I want AI opponents I can learn tricks from, and not fools those are always worse than me or only pretend to be good (by beaming onto the road in front of me, like what Ridge Racer arcade version seems to do).
excellent video, thank you for making this! If you're ever planning on making these kinds of videos for games that will allow it, I'll totally be down for it!
Thanks for clarifying all this :)
I noticed a few interesting things playing that game.
If you make a track around the fence (with the longest straights and the sharpest (1x1) corners) and let the opponents go without interfering with them, then Bernie and Joe do the same time, and Otto and Cherry do the same time. It doesn't matter if they go with the LM002, Acura, GTO, Jaguar, 962 or Indycar, their times are the same.
More interestingly Helen and Skid don't do the best lap with the Indycar (3rd, Jag is 2nd), but with the 962. Bernie and Joe are slightly better with GTO than with Jag or 962 (I didn't test all the cars). And surprisingly Cherry is also better with the Jag and 962 than with Indycar.
Even more interestingly Skid do a lap-time with these fastest cars that you simply unable to. 😲
If change the 1x1 corners to the 2x2 then all of them do better with better cars (LM002
very interesting, seems like as a kid I had figured out how the different AI work quite well.
Great video! Please tell me the next game is 'Realm of the Haunting'! Such great times with it!
Used to spend hours making custom courses on this. I always use to split the course at one point with a shorter distance but a non-survivable hazard, the AI always took the shorter route :D
What is a non-survivable hazard? Is it a section missing from the track, thus the AI loses its direction... or an impossibly long jump? I think Kris previously demonstrated something resembling the latter, in that if he took the jump too fast or two slow, crashing was guaranteed.
@@Christopher-N usually involved a jump they could not make and fell into the side of the other ramp or one of the tunnels were you need to drive onto the ceiling to get past a wall.
Since the AI tries to adhere to certain speed values, if you place track pieces in certain combinations, particularly after a jump since the AI loses steering while airborne, you can much more assuredly guarantee their demise. The simplest example is an elevated turn IMMEDIATELY following a ramp to go up to an elevated section. Almost none of the AI can survive that one if they're up to their top speed for ramps. :P
Now you can play against human opponents real-time. It's not perfect, you can't collide normally and have to set car and track manually for both players.
I randomly thought about making a multiplayer for this. Fortunately there is a static pointer for every DOSBox version.
In about 2-3 hours it was complete and working (mostly thanks to my previous projects). It even syncs the replay rewinding, which is funny, but dangerous.
Currently it only works with one version of the game and only with DOSBox 0.74-3.
It turned out way better than my remake attempt with multiplayer.
I discovered as a kid, that car performance files could be edited with XTRee Gold HEX editor. I had lots of fund editing cars' engine start skid stop parameters. I think that it's the same method with AI parameters.
Joe sometimes mentions after a loss that you should let him 'drive the Acura next time'. I always thought he indeed did drive much more confident in the Acura, though I never actually tested if it made much of a difference compared to him driving other cars.
I always thought Helen's problem (her liking bumper cars) might have meant that she was more accident-prone than the other drivers. Back when I played the game I did think she crashed more than the other drivers (a lot of DNF's) but I never tested this either.
It's not impossible that later versions changed the AI... then again, a quick test shows he can give you that "drive the Acura" line even if you put him in the Acura. :P
You're right... And here I was thinking that they actually knew what they were doing with their AI :P
Before you replied I tried putting Joe in the Acura for fun to see how fast he would finish the default race track, then later have Skid Vicious race in the Acura as well to see if Joe indeed would perform better in the Acura with a time close to Skid's. Much to my surprise it turned out that Skid's time was actually much SLOWER. Then I watched the replay and I found out why... for some inexplicable reason, Skid chose to drive the alternate route! (he took a left after the first slalom)
I'm thinking some aspects of this game's AI will always remain shrouded in mystery :)
@@ArchEvil666 Well, at least until someone with far too much time on their hands decides to comb through a disassembly of it. :P
Skid Vicious has such pretty sprites damn it, I should use it as avatar
I remember this game because I was playing it when Princess Diana died :D
Wow, you spent more time investigating the Stunts "AI" than I spent writing it.
As a developer myself, it's interesting to analyze the results of code when there are various possibilities to consider, but when you don't have the code to work with and disassembling is more trouble than it's worth... and you're trying to entertain others, trial and error comparisons tend to be a good way to demonstrate the inner workings of these old games! ;)
Wait, did you really are one of the programmers of the game?
@@sebastianaliandkulche Unless I'm mistaken, KPexEA is Kevin Pickell, so yes, he very much was the programmer on Stunts! ;)
and that is insanely cool that the actual programmer behind the AIs commented on your video examining them@@Pixelmusement
I love statistics and I love stunts!! Good times, man :) Cheers for the trip down memory lane...
Did you check different cars with the same AI lineup? Some characters ask you to give them a "proper car" even if you give them the indy :D
Makes no difference. It was one of those things I tested in the preliminary stuff I skipped and showed Skid in a non-Indy car at the start of the video just to at least hint that I was testing that stuff. :P
@@Pixelmusement oh right I did not catch that :)
Haha those are some very Camageddon opponent names.
Or rather Carmageddon has some very Stunts opponent names.
Stunts came out several years before Carmageddon, so... the second one. :B
A "Helen Weales" is the default winner name on the Super Stunt Track of "Race Drivin" (Atari arcade game).
@12:00 The elevated roads? you had a the start/finish on the hill that translated into a bridge, but perhaps they meant going up a bridge?
I mean, it's not impossible, but there was no good way to test that. Besides, those pieces can be used as jumps meaning there's a certain relatively high target speed the AI MUST hit no matter what when those elevation changes occur. :P
lol , this is great. Played the crap out of this game back in the day.
While being kids we found out that none of the AIs could handle concurrent uphills and downhills on a straight track. All you need to do is pump the gas pedal without touching the steering wheel. But the opponents always ended up wrecking their cars instantly no matter what you do. That’s clearly a disadvantage of Skid as well.
The game engine doesn't really appreciate it either. If you try to make such a hill produce a jump onto a flat bridge or jump ramp following the game won't let you, even though it would totally work in terms of the game's physics... while at the same time the game will VERY MUCH let you have a bridge on the side of the hill drop you through a gap in the bridge right next to the hill! D:
Considering how they behave differently in game than the manual I am wondering if they AI code got switched between drivers. It would certainly explain the discrepancies.
There are some differences on the last elevated tracks though.
Yes, but not appreciable though. A fraction of a second difference across a two-minute long drive is barely worth mentioning and I believe is only a factor of how the AI treats ramp tiles, even when flat because they've been put on hills.
That's why for racing AI at least, I do like Stunt Driver. One crash doesnt take out the cars, instead there is damage and pit stops, and if you time your hits right, you can take them out of the race. Stunts is the better overall game though
Will you be reviewing Realms of the Haunting next?
That's what I thought as well.
Hmm... is the next game Realms of the Haunting?
hahaha - i actually luaghed out loud when skid vious jumped and tried to aovid you and then crashed!
Have toy tried the old remake from like 6 years ago and the new one still being worked on?
I remember trying some sort of remake several years ago and being very underwhelmed due to a poor UI and poor controls. Haven't looked into anything related to it since. :P
7:54--Wait a minute... 😖
Yeah, don't think for a second I was gonna MISS that! ;D
I remember having so many tracks from the bbs. Fuck I'm old but whatever this was my (insert amazing cg game from 2024)
Also just making insane full map banked ovals with one obstacle at peak speed
How cool would it be to make a visual re-make of this game, using the latest unreal engine? I think it would be fun to re-make these kind of classic games. Would be funny to also remake the characters, using chat gpt technology to see what random things that they have to say when you play against them.
I played the absolute shit out of this game in the early 90's. Street rod 1, street rod 2, Test Drive.
They were multiple remakes but most werent finished, let alone released. The most recent one i think it was the entire game ported to Open GL. Think about it like a kind of reverse engineering PC port. You can find it in TH-cam and the dev is still answering comments though he didnt finished it yet and he would probably take it a lot of time.
10:09 If you knew the virtual distance between each yellow road line couldn't you work out the speed by timing how long it takes to move from one line to the next?
In theory, but it would be a lot trickier than that as the rendering of the polygons is not precise and is heavily influenced by the camera position, plus the AI sometimes doesn't get into its pathing perfectly and thus bounces around within it or fails to drive perfectly straight. One thing which MIGHT help is that you can't blow your engine if you switch to using a manual transmission; your car simply refuses to go faster once it hits the speed limit for the gear you're in, so you could test the various cars in that manner yourself to find a baseline speed and work from there, but it would still be quite the chore to figure everything out that way. :P
@@Pixelmusement OK, I guess you're meant to be having fun figuring that stuff out, so not worth it if it's a chore.
@@Pixelmusement Simply count the yellow road lines passed per second in replay (possibly using external screen recorder) to get an idea of the speed.
Should we be placing bets on the AI drivers? Too bad you can't put multiple AI drivers on the same track at the same time. It would be interesting to see how badly things can go wrong.
Given that these are two-lane roads, the answer would be "VERY BADLY". :P
Stunt Island plz!
I never noticed that. I always took Helen because she's hot! :) I loved her faces, the sad, and the happy too.
Skid Vicious = Sid Vicious from Skid Row? 🤔
Mama always said, stupid is as stupid does.
I had a lot of fun playing this and 'Stunt Driver'
So I was wandering about the AI's portraits... are they pictures of real people? If so, who are they?
They're not credited in the manual but those are clearly digitized photos so it's most likely people on the QA team or possibly some of the developers, all of whom dressed up for it. (Three women are named in the Special Thanks but there were no women on the actual dev team.)
The opponents were based on the members of the programming crew. Except for Helen Wheels, she was a model specially hired to pose. One of the programmers gave an interview to the Stunts fan site in the early 2000-s. P. S. By the way, Helen is gorgeous, really stunning lady :)
@@Pixelmusement , Bernie Rubber is David Adams (artist), Herr Otto Partz is Erik Kiss (programmer), "Smokin" Joe Stalin is Dave Davis (producer), Cherry Chassis (model we hired), Helen Wheels is Athena Baxevanakis (artist) , Skid Vicious is Chris Taylor (programmer)
@@KPexEA As expected. Doing gamedev in the late 80s and early 90s you worked with what you had and if all you needed were some silly portraits, might as well just bring a camera and some costumes to the office! ;D
@@KPexEA you confused Helen and Cherry. Cherry's prototype was Athena Baxevanakis and Helen's appearence was taken from a specially hired model. Helen looks like a typical late 80s glamour girl
I wonder if AI on the Amiga's version of Stunts was as bad as on PC?
It's almost certainly identical. :P
Herr Otto Partz.. xD
Ehhh, double max speed does not equate to half the time to complete a course. You have to factor in acceleration as well as deceleration for turns and obstacles.
It would be approximately similar to double time, especially given the way acceleration and turning work in Stunts, or let's put it this way: certainly would've been more than a mere 25% time increase as demonstrated. :P
The virgin bernie the chad skid
I was sincerely hoping you'd be diving into the code or the data for the game to really show what makes it tick. Alas, perhaps the next time you return to Stunts.
I generally prefer not to dive into code for fun because to me, coding feels like work. Besides, machine code and assembly are two forms of programming I never really learned all that well and don't really understand enough to do that kind of deep dive properly. :P
i don't really think people need to dive into the code to see how things work when things like this demonstrate it just fine and are easier to understand, but thats just me
Anyone can build a beamng drive workshop stunts mod please
You are too hard on the AI. Remember this was done 30 years ago
Don't confuse "investigating" with "criticizing". I was just curious how the AI actually fared comparatively with itself. :B
Im Bernie but in life
First!
..aaand I'm ashamed.
Giving my comment some actual relevancy, Stunts is one of my childhood games and I'm really surprised that, not only does it have a cult following, but it even has a decent modding scene that surpasses the in-built track editor, meaning people have been making custom cars for it too. Here's hoping you check it out if you haven't already.
This was an absolutely fascinating deep dive into one of the most underrated driving games across multiple systems. I wonder if it would be worth it to look into how the AI works in other ports, like the FM-Towns Marty version? Could be different, but probably isn't.
The AI probably works exactly the same, but because the AI drivers were changed for the Japanese ports they may have also adjusted the variables being used for them...? I don't actually know. :o