Racing AI’s Thought Process
Open, 100% Blender 3.3/2.93, Cycles 256s
If you could look under the hood of a racing game and see what the AI was doing, this is what it might look like. I’ve read up on elementry game AI, and this method, waypoints, is a common one for racing games. The basic idea is that the car navigates itself from waypoint to waypoint to follow the track. It usually follows a set path (here, a BezierCurve), the drive line. If it wants to pass, it uses the drive line or the overtake line depending on where the car it is trying to pass is. If it gets knocked off course, it will attempt to navigate to the next waypoint to rejoin the race. In this case, the AI car wants to pass the player car (driven by Suzanne), so, given the player car’s position, it might wait a bit so one of its navigation lines is open, then zoom past the player. Another trick is that the AI knows of hazards up ahead, so it can prepare.
The car was built previously, in Blender 2.93, for a previous project. The rock generator/scatterer was in my asset library. The landscape is ANT + some sculpting.