Im not sure if this is just a problem I have, but there are a few things that are a bit irritating about the AI.

1)If you brush the AI even slightly, quite often they slow right down, taking out cars behind them, obviously unless it is a pretty big hit, in real life you wouldnt slow down hard if another car just brushed your side.

2)the AI dont seem to have much spacial awareness, they just move across on you, if you spin on track they also make little attempt to avoid you, i would love if AI were able to squeeze all they could if you tried to pass them.

3)AI do little to defend their line, in other sims such as GP4 and rFactor, AI will defend by blocking at all costs.

Ofcourse I know LFS is more online oriented, but quite a few of us including me like to do a lot of offline racing. Dont get me wrong in some ways the AI in LFS are brilliant as unlike in rFactor they drive smoothly, not twictching about eraticaly like in rFactor.

Another thing, ive been driving the GTR cars lately, and yes they are mean and I love racing them, but they arent true big GT cars until they spit big flames, especially the XR GTR and the FX GTR as they are turbos, I think the sight of GTR cars with flames licking out of the exhaust would really add to the immersion of being in a field of big bad GT cars. Please correct me if I am wrong, but I never see any flames from the exhaust.

LFS has the best publicly available physics ive ever tried, closest to what ive expierienced in real life by far, now it just needs to fill in the gaps in the fine details and it will be the No.1 by even further

PS: Are there sparks from the undertray on some cars?? I cant remember if ive seen any

Joe

Nope, no sparks or other fancy visual doo-dads like that, yet.

All the issues with the AI, and the backfire, have been brought up in the past. The backfire is more-than-likely posted in the Suggested Improvements Log, stickied at the top of this forum section.

When patch Y was due, Scawen said that he had plannned to program awareness of other cars into the AI. But that large number of bug reports had made that impossible (because patch Y had to be ready before Christmas). He estimated it would only be a couple of days' work to add it.

Based on that, I expect we will see this last bit of AI improvement in the next patch. (It's only my guess, though. Nobody knows for sure if it will be.)

Quote from wsinda :

When patch Y was due, Scawen said that he had plannned to program awareness of other cars into the AI. But that large number of bug reports had made that impossible (because patch Y had to be ready before Christmas). He estimated it would only be a couple of days' work to add it.

Based on that, I expect we will see this last bit of AI improvement in the next patch. (It's only my guess, though. Nobody knows for sure if it will be.)

Excellent, thanks

is there any such hint as to when the patch / test patch is supposed to be released?

No. There is never any word unless it is said by Scawen or Vic directly on these forums. In all other cases, it's released when it is ready to be released, no sooner.