Unrealistic AI Traffic

[Wawrzu]

Hi guys. I've recently been trying to change something in the AI traffic, make it less unrealistic, or I shall say less stupid. I've tried several mods that are supposed to make the AI traffic realistic, but none of them could fix some issues that I find more and more irritating, they mostly just increase the traffic density or change it depending on the time of day etc. The examples of irritating AI's behaviours that I try to get rid of are:

1. This happens alot. I can't drive on highway for more than 5 minutes of real time without that happening: the cars driving on highway slow down significantly or stop completely to let the vehicles waiting to enter the highway in. I used to be annoyed by the fact that I'm being given the right of way too often, but now the AI cars give it to each other in situations where it is not prudent, nor needed at all.
2. After the AI car enters the highway, it often switches to the left lane without a reason. There is no car ahead of it which it could overtake, yet they still switch to the left side just to come back to the right one after a couple of seconds. Sometimes it happens when I'm on the left lane and they just jump in front of me making me brake.
3. They slow down too much when the see a random event. Even when it is just a police car that pulled another car over on a highway and they are parked on the emergency lane. The AI tend to slow down from 100 to 60/50, which is not needed in such situation.
4. Breaking after overtaking. After finishing the overtaking maneuver they "tap" the brakes in front of you. It is not as much annoying as the situations above, as I am used to it but still, it shouldn't be like that.
5. Occasionaly they simply slow down or stop in the middle of the road for no reason. It happens rarely, however it shouldn't.

Are those just in-game vanilla mechanics that can't be changed or is there a solution for it? It slowly ruins the game for me as I tend to be impatient. And I want my game to be as realistic as possible. I'd like to know whether it's a common thing with the AI traffic or is it my game that is bugged somehow. And I would like to see some suggestions/mod recomendations that would help me change it. Thank you in advance. Here's a picture of my little toy

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[Madkine]

No 3 is the only one that may be able to be modded.

The rest definitely require SCS code changes.

[Wawrzu]

That's sad. Number 1 is the most annoying for me and I could stand all of the rest just to have the n1 fixed. :/

[Soilingcomic]

Cars stopping on the entry lane of the motorway. Dangerous IRL and not the way to do it. The AI should accelerate hard until they match the motorway speed and then blend into the traffic. The yield rule needs to be re-written for highways in the game.

[Some newbie driver]

Number 1 is NOT cars in the highway giving right to other AI to enter (AI only gives "unnecessary" right to us, to players, not to other AI). Number 1 happens because AI vehicles (since a few updates ago) are being more aggressive merging into main lanes or in crossroads (back in time they required obscene amounts of safe distances and that cause long blockades).

Problem is that the calculations of the AI are approximate, they have a range. And now, what happens sometimes, the vehicle in the merging lane enters when it has not enough security distance with the main lanes thus causing the vehicles in main lane to slow down a lot. It can even be said that's a "realistic" behavior because depicts what IRL happens sometimes due mor*** driving as if the road is theirs. But I don't thing SCS wanted to depict this on purpose.

Anyway, that happens "sometimes", not continuously, not at all. Yesterday I drove over 5000km and I saw that happen once (and another too aggressive behavior in a crossroad). There's not enough traffic on the roads by default for that to be a general problem and just a fraction of the AI merging maneuvers are too aggressive and cause the main lane to have to brake. Not unless you have tinkered your traffic parameters (manually or with mods), you are using map mods that maybe don't define well enough the merging lanes or you are continuously driving on the same places and the map contains some error in the definition of some merging lanes on there (so, you behold more times the same behavior and end thinking is something general).

Number 2 is really weird and you are right, in some cases can cause a crash. Better to always give distance to merging vehicles in front of us until they fix it.

About number 3, it's not a bug, its the AI behaving as we all MUST do but as like nobody does neither playing or IRL. When there's potentially people in the shoulder of a road and we can't let them enough lateral distance to our vehicle, we should be driving way slower than we did. A different story is that the wisest maneuver in that case (if possible) would be to move to the left lane/opposing lane. But AI doesn't do such kind of maneuvers except on very specific situations. It's one of the things that could improve AI behavior in the most noticeable way actually: that they move to other lanes to avoid events, give space for merging or other things; actually AI control doesn't evaluate that as a possibility.

Number 4 is annoying (and dangerous) indeed, because they finish the overtake letting a correct safe distance (correct on IRL parameters) but as they brake way harder and unrealistically, it's easy we can't react fast enough. Anyways, I noticed that behavior is less frequent now than time ago (or I'm being extremely lucky, something I don't think it's happening).

Number 5 could be due some error in the road that makes them think they have to go slower. There are also errors in other places where we players saw a speed limit on the Road Advisor that AI trucks greatly overpass. So, it could be the same but on the opposite situation.

Regards

[Optional Features]

I'd personally like to see a GTA-style traffic system implemented in ATS. Right now, if you stop in the lane of traffic in ATS, the vehicles will turn on their hazards and stop behind you. Some towards the back will merge, but most just stop.

In GTA, which is definitely not a driving sim, the AI is knowledgeable to go around these obstructions, in addition to merging without stopping, and maintaining speed on the highway etc.

The whole traffic system in game needs a complete revamp beginning with more self awareness. If the vehicle knows where it is in the road, it can make much better decisions.

[Some newbie driver]

The AI traffic can't have a revamp until more core things of the game will not be completely revamped too.

[Wawrzu]

Number 1 is NOT cars in the highway giving right to other AI to enter (AI only gives "unnecessary" right to us, to players, not to other AI). Number 1 happens because AI vehicles (since a few updates ago) are being more aggressive merging into main lanes or in crossroads (back in time they required obscene amounts of safe distances and that cause long blockades).

Problem is that the calculations of the AI are approximate, they have a range. And now, what happens sometimes, the vehicle in the merging lane enters when it has not enough security distance with the main lanes thus causing the vehicles in main lane to slow down a lot. It can even be said that's a "realistic" behavior because depicts what IRL happens sometimes due mor*** driving as if the road is theirs. But I don't thing SCS wanted to depict this on purpose.

Anyway, that happens "sometimes", not continuously, not at all. Yesterday I drove over 5000km and I saw that happen once (and another too aggressive behavior in a crossroad). There's not enough traffic on the roads by default for that to be a general problem and just a fraction of the AI merging maneuvers are too aggressive and cause the main lane to have to brake. Not unless you have tinkered your traffic parameters (manually or with mods), you are using map mods that maybe don't define well enough the merging lanes or you are continuously driving on the same places and the map contains some error in the definition of some merging lanes on there (so, you behold more times the same behavior and end thinking is something general).

Number 2 is really weird and you are right, in some cases can cause a crash. Better to always give distance to merging vehicles in front of us until they fix it.

About number 3, it's not a bug, its the AI behaving as we all MUST do but as like nobody does neither playing or IRL. When there's potentially people in the shoulder of a road and we can't let them enough lateral distance to our vehicle, we should be driving way slower than we did. A different story is that the wisest maneuver in that case (if possible) would be to move to the left lane/opposing lane. But AI doesn't do such kind of maneuvers except on very specific situations. It's one of the things that could improve AI behavior in the most noticeable way actually: that they move to other lanes to avoid events, give space for merging or other things; actually AI control doesn't evaluate that as a possibility.

Number 4 is annoying (and dangerous) indeed, because they finish the overtake letting a correct safe distance (correct on IRL parameters) but as they brake way harder and unrealistically, it's easy we can't react fast enough. Anyways, I noticed that behavior is less frequent now than time ago (or I'm being extremely lucky, something I don't think it's happening).

Number 5 could be due some error in the road that makes them think they have to go slower. There are also errors in other places where we players saw a speed limit on the Road Advisor that AI trucks greatly overpass. So, it could be the same but on the opposite situation.

Regards

Thank you for your comprenhensive answer. I'd like to clarify some things.

ad 1. To me that is the most annoying problem. It doesn't happen always, but happens alot, especially during the day. During the night, when there is less traffic, it doesn't happen frequently enough to irritate me. My traffic parameters surely has been tinkered due to the mods, so I reckon that's the main problem here. I don't think the map mods I use could have anything to do about it, because the only ones I use are latest Promods and Rusmap with all of the map DLCs installed; and I don't drive around the same places continously, I like to travel from one end of the map to the second.

ad 3. Yes, I'm aware that this behaviour is something we all should do on the road both in real life and in game, I don't mind the fact that AI slows down. I just think they slow down too much. In a real life slowing down as significantly as the AI does in-game would cause more danger than not decreasing the speed at all in such sitatuion.

To sum it up, situations from number 2-5 don't have as significant influence on my in-game experience as situations from number 1. I guess uninstalling all mods that change the traffic's density could do the trick, but on the other hand I find the vanilla traffic too unrealistic. I guess I'm in a fix now. Anyway, thank you for the answer once again.

[Some newbie driver]

Well, about number 3, point is that as I said IRL we should be slowing so much, but nobody does and thus you (and everybody) find it weird. Also because, as I said, IRL what it's more usual (not counting homicidal people at drive) is to leave enough lateral distance with the "event" in the shoulder (what allows us to keep the speed and increase no risk). So, the real problem isn't that AI does what it should, but that he doesn't consider other alternatives that exist and don't bother the traffic flow. Also, the fact that AI vehicles could brake so hard (a lot more than us, unless you are using max unrealistic brake intensity) makes that problem bigger than it should be. We need to increase a lot the safety distance with other vehicles in order to match our braking capacity with the one of the AI vehicle in front, and that's not always easy to achieve because that AI traffic use to drive a few km/h under our cruise speed (so, there's a trend to keep approaching them).

And about situation 1, I can't give you any clue about if some of the mods you could be using is the responsible to add too much traffic. I mean, it's not too much if it's realistic, but the AI control isn't prepared to handle it correctly thus that kind of problems you mention become too frequent. The first I would look is if you have the traffic density configuration value over 1.0 (don't remember exactly the name, but lots of other players could help with that). Any value over 1.0 can cause lots of weirdness. If that's the case and you could manually set it back to 1.0 and no mod you have revert it to higher values, maybe you could enjoy more your drives.

Whatever, regarding AI behavior, the margin of that SCS can do is very very narrow actually. Due the constrains of the game, whatever improvement on the AI control means they have to worsen the performance of something else in the game. Until they can't change the mostly mono-core architecture of their game, that's the limit they have. The day they could change that, you are going to notice it for sure.

Regards

[netshadoe]

About number 3, the way the AI react might be reflecting some kind of law in some country...not sure about rules in Europe since I'm Canadian.

Here in my province of Ontario (motor vehicle laws are provincial in Canada), we must slow to 60km/h if we can not provide one lane of clearance.
So, basically, on a two lane road or on a highway where you can't move over to the fast lanes (due to traffic), you MUST slow to 60km/h.
Highway speed can be maintained if you can provide the one lane clearance.

As for the other 4 items, I see the same, and it's mildly annoying, but you can anticiapate it.

I'll add #6:

6. When a light turns green, I'll move out into an intersection into position to make a left turn across the oncoming traffic lanes. If I go beyond a certain point, the on coming AI stop even though they have the right of way. Same thing if you inch up too close to a road intersection...the traffic just stops dead even though you're not blocking traffic.

Hopefully, the AI engine will be put on the list in the future. I'm all for eyecandy, new areas, and pretty new trucks and trailers and modding DLC that go with them, but the AI needs more love than a few enhancements.