Hello! My original idea for my hon's project is to look into Driving AI but in particular looking into how an AI would deal with slipstreaming and use it to it's advantage. Slipstreaming is when there is a car infront another car during a race. Since they are driving fast, the air pressure acts against the car slowing it down, however if the a car has something to break the air pressure infront it, such as another car, then they can actually move faster since there is less pressure slowing the car down.
I wish to look into this and see if there are problems with the current way of doing it, and why more racing games do not have this feature. I also wish to look into the different ways that this can be done, and see if it can be improved upon.
For thsi idea, I would build a program that would simply make 2 cars go around a track. (If time allows I wish to do a complex track so that thety AI would have to take into account the corners when trying to overtake, however if this is not realistic, I wish to do just an oval track). One car would travel at a constant speed around the track, where as the other car would try to use slipstreaming to try and get infront of it.
I hope this is a good enough description, if you wish to know more about my idea, comment away! :D Thanks!
Sounds like an interesting idea. I'm curious as to how much you will be focusing on the actual physics of the slipstreaming and how much on the ai side of things.
ReplyDeleteI did a bit of googling about ai/slipstreaming/car physics etc (in my attempt at being helpful) and I must say I didn't come up with much. But I did find some stuff on car racing physics which might be helpful in constructing the actual app - http://www.gamedev.net/reference/list.asp?categoryid=139