January 12, 2023 • 52 mins
We hit the ground running in the first iRacing Downshift of the new year as we look ahead to a full calendar of Special Events and series for 2023. This month's guests are our AI team of Nigel Pattinson, Alex Saunders, and Brent Foster, who talk about what sets iRacing AI apart, what to look out for in the future, and the very unique career that Brent left behind before joining us.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
This week on the Eye Racing downShift. We're ready to ring in a
new year. Christ wants no morevacations. I'm just gonna delete that out
of the HR portal. It's specialevents season. Or if I'll actually set
me on the team and you calledme and ask if you could race,
and the AI guys join us totalk about all the ways you can use
I Racing AI. You set theAI really low, you start the back
(00:21):
and make like a three lap race, and you play hero mode. Nothing
wrong with that at all. Allthis and more, it's strap it.
Welcome to I Racing dash If Tammiels, Greg West, I'm back with the
boys, Kevin Bobbitt and Chris Leone. Got a great show for you to
day. It is special events seasonhere at I Racing. We've got a
(00:41):
lot of opportunities to go race,go race with your friends. Of the
coming weeks, We've got a niceinterview with not one, not two,
but the three members of our AIteam. They're gonna talk about developing AI,
what's coming, what they've been workingon, and just kind of the
whole process. I wish it wasa video interview so you could see Nigel's
hair since he you know, asas smart as Einstein and kind of looks
(01:03):
like him too. I got permissionto say that sort of, so it's
fine. And then we're gonna tellas long as HR doesn't listen to the
intro, we're fine. Now youwere there. He gave me verbal permission.
We're fine. Hey, we're gonnatalk about NASCAR free agency, get
kicked off this week and finished offtalking about the world of out Car,
(01:23):
world of Outlaw Sprint car series,things that go round and around on dirt,
which is Chris Leone's specialty, orso you think. So if you
listen to this podcast, how arewe doing? A voice awesome? Happy
New Year? Happy New Year?Have you written any checks wrong? Or
is that dating myself? Nobody writescheck right? One check a month to
(01:44):
my h o A, and I'mangry every month when I write did you
put the right year on it?Or did you write twenty two? Uh?
Well, I haven't returned it,so I'm gonna sue us. There
you go. Actually, I knowI dropped it off. It's like the
last day of December. I haven'twritten the January one yet, so I've
I've got an opportunity to screw itup. I'll report back. The first
(02:06):
news story that I saved of theyear I saved the document is twenty twenty
one, so I'm regressive. Wow, how proud of you right now?
That's awesome. You're two years behind. That's impressive, Chris, well done.
Well, you know, how doyou even make this meeting? Like?
I you know, I don't know. I mean, but if you've
(02:28):
ever shared a race track with me, you know that two years behind is
pretty modest. And yeah, that'sfair. Maybe we shouldn't let you take
all that time off over the holidays. It's too too long for your brain
to just shut down him. Yeah, and and my break was a disaster
too, so I probably should havegotten back to work quicker. Well lesson
learned. That's take a vacation again. Chris wants no more vacations. So
(02:50):
I'm just gonna delete that out ofthe HR portal and we're all set.
I said, problems solved, creativesolutions to complicated problems. What Kevin,
what'd you do over the holidays?Just? Uh, family and friends,
you know, just hanging out todo anything super exciting. Didn't go anywhere,
but the boys are home, whichis great. And uh hung out
what about you? Yeah, kindof same old, same old plant plants,
(03:14):
indoor golf and and doing a lotof I racing on on the uh
the current season Race Challenge hosted byChief Stewart nim Cross Bunch just picked up
a new series in that he guesswhat I'm racing? Does it have to
do with does it rhyme? WasSCHMOORSA? No? Oh no, rookie
street stocks. I'm in it.Yeah, for those that don't know,
(03:35):
we have we have taken a ruleout anybody can race rookie street stocks now.
So it's uh, it's because ofmy my B level oval license clearly,
UH made me too good for thatseries. Not um No, I'm
having fun in him though. They'requick, short races, um plenty of
time. I think they're every hour, you know, I just jump in
(03:57):
and go, um awesome any time. Looking updated car model too, so
you should drive that in VR bythe way, And I'm giving away lots
so I let you win awards becauselots of people are beating me. Kevin's
making it rain rookies day one onI Racing, you can earn an I'll
let you win a word a word. I can't talk. How cool is
that? Right? I'm I'm acommunity guy. You know I'm doing the
(04:18):
right thing. Magnanimous that's your wordof the day, right, Chris,
can you spell? That's no?That's no. No, we're not We're
not doing him. Need to stuffwith my agent, hippopotamus, agent manager.
(04:38):
I need seventy two hours clear spaceso I can get my head in
the game. Leslie, I thinkwe've already lost control of this podcast.
Leslie's addicted to the script spelling Bee, by the way, she's like the
biggest fan. She takes days off. She tweets at them, They tweet
back. It's that's her things.What word did you guys lose in your
elementary school spelling bees as a kid? Because is I lost on plagiarism because
(05:01):
I tried to spell it like plague. I lost on money. I thought,
you guys you copied somebody. ButI am never imitated, never duplicated.
And I'm beginning to wonder if theproblem is me. I guess I
want to talk about I racing?Sure? Why not? All right,
Well, I'm gonna read directly offChris's outline. Then he magnanimously supplied to
(05:25):
us thirty eight minutes ago with aboutten minutes notice. Uh, latest news
and special events in bold I Racingroar is this weekend one of the most
fun events you can do on IRacing. Uh. Not a team event,
solo. It's two point four hourskind of you know, tis the
(05:46):
season for things that are twenty fourhours, as we'll talk about in a
moment, but a really a reallyfun event for the community. We've got
the touring cars are going to beout there. We've got the brand new
Toyota GR eighty six cup car,and I think we got the GT fours.
I made this series and I justforgot that sounds correct? Yeah right,
(06:09):
you got it. I did it. Yeah yeah, shaking off the
holiday rust yeah yeah, well theten pounds you know, either either one
of those, but yeah, thatkicks off this weekend. Details in the
forums. We've got four races goingoff, four time slash I should say
going off and once again that's that'stwo point four hours of solo. Good
(06:31):
times around Daytona and the low poweredcars and Kevin. That's that's kind of
the dress rehearsal for the Eye RacingDaytona twenty four powered by Vco the first
race of the the VCO Grand Slam. They're back this year. Vico's big
sponsor of our special events. Greatto have them on board. They have
got Daytona this year, which hastraditionally been our biggest event. I think
(06:54):
right number ye, So looking forwardto that. Several staff teams UH participating.
We'll see if Greig can twist myarm or not, if I can,
or if he'll actually set me onthe team. Is really called me
and ask if you could race.We made room for you. I was
begging to be on the team andthat they're gonna let me like so,
man have some more so so youmight see some staff out there and maybe
(07:18):
we'll get a win or something.Who knows, maybe we'll just finish.
Probably not art. We're driving theP two and the staff one of the
staff cars, and we have everybodyfrom I think Brian Lockwood's got like an
eight thousand I R two and I'mnot trying to pick on you, Kevin,
but to Kevin Bobbitt, who's gotwhat two thousand? Being nice,
(07:42):
you're being nice. If we wantto round up, sure, but we'll
be right there in some middle split. It'll be it'll be entertaining. You
guys love me being on the teambecause I bring the average down. Yeah,
sure, well we'll go with that. No, but it should be
a VCO, right, And sothey're sponsoring again. They've got Sebring as
(08:05):
well, Watkins Glenn and Petite Lamp, so they're in for the four pack
this year. I wanted to finishthat thought. Sorry. Happens to be
the very similar to the Mitchelin EnduranceCup. Interesting how that works. Funny
how that works. So pretty excitedfor those races this year too. I
mean it's pretty much one for oneto what MPs is doing with the the
(08:28):
GTP car, the BMW being debutedin December. We have the LMP two
class covered with the dlar P twoseventeen, and we have the GTD or
GT three class as very well representedas well. So three classes are racing
this year in the Daytona twenty four. Really excited. I saw Doug on
Twitter having fun conversations with the withthe the Daytona twenty four Twitter handle.
(08:52):
It's it's pretty entertaining to watch themgo back and forth. So yeah,
very excited about that. So wehave once again this week we've got the
Roar next weekend, we've got theDayton of twenty four. Lots of opportunity
to spend way too much time onI Racing, so remember to spend a
lot of time. There's significant othersduring the week, so you're not in
(09:13):
trouble on the weekend. Pro tipon that. But we have our special
events calendar that there's a lot moreto it than just the special events.
And by just the special events,I think there's twenty six out of fifty
two this year or something like that, but we fifty two weeks. But
we also have a bunch of returningseries that are going to have their calendars
(09:33):
announced in the coming weeks. Nerburgringand Durance Championship, one of the most
popular series we have on I Racing, averaged over a thousand people every few
weeks racing around the Nerburgring, sothat will be back with nine races this
year. We've got the BMW Msim Cup, which details to be announced
(09:56):
coming soon unless Kevin wants to canyou remember from the negotiation, they're gonna
be BMW's in the series. Thereyou go. That's all the details we
can share right now. But it'scoming back. It'll be good, yeah,
very excited notice, he said,BMW's it's almost like there's more than
more than one. So maybe maybea format change from the series formerly known
(10:22):
as the the BMWSMGT Cup and thenof course very popular the Crevintic series the
twelve hour in durance races. There'sfour of those throughout the season, so
all of those calendars will be announcedin the coming weeks. I think my
favorite part about these calendars none ofthese events overlap, so you can do
all of them without any of themoverlapping. We have no more room in
(10:46):
the calendar. We are out ofspace. Anything after that, something's got
to give, but a lot ofwe need to make the year longer,
is what you're saying. Man,they're going by so fast. Go for
it. Happy, happy to fortiesaround the corner, my friend. So
all right, well we have agreat panel for our interview today. We
sat down Kevin and I just abouttwenty minutes ago with our AI development team
(11:11):
of Nigel Pattinson, Alexanders and BrentFoster. This is the team that the
team behind the team that make thoselittle little cars with the big hearts ratio
as hard as they do. Butthey sat down and discussed you know kind
of what goes into AI and youknow kind of what makes a tick.
So, without further ado, yeah, guys, all right, Kevin and
(11:33):
I are back and with a trioof guests. This time we had two
with Nigel and Tyler. We decidedto up the ante a little bit this
week with we've got Nigel Pattinson,Alexanders and Brent Foster. You may wonder
what do these three guys have incommon. While these are the guys behind
the AI on I racing, thisthe team behind the team per se.
(11:56):
So guys, welcome, welcome tothe show. Thanks for having us.
Hey, yep, gould to behit. All right, so let's go
around the room first of all andjust kind of introduce everybody. Uh So,
first of all, we'll start withNigel. Uh, you're a senior
software engineer. What do you do? Uh you know, what do you
do with AI? Well, Iguess I've done the coding, taking it
(12:18):
on from originally the codebase that wascame from NASCAR two thousand and three and
bringing it up to where it isis now just on the eyeslide. You
make that sound so simple. Um, yeah, it's it's been a challenge
at times, but it's it's it'smore more hard slog than anything too too
(12:43):
deep or perceptive. I think,what what did you do before or you
were here? Like what was yourjob? Oh, I've just said programming
jobs in recently C plus plus butin various different industries. Nothing not more
strict casing anything boring stuff. Again, I started kind of mucking around with
(13:07):
games, going back at least akind of Indy Car one and so I
don't know, I looked at thefile formats and did a few few tweaks.
Like I think in those days,the games had palettes and when you
try to take a track from oneof the games to another game, all
the colors would be wrong. SoI think I came out with some program
to fix up the colors. Butthen when GPL came out, that was
(13:28):
a pretty cool game, and soa lot of modifying that in various ways.
Supported some of the mods like thesixty nine cars that have got wings,
that have downforce, and it washad a big system for changing the
code and making all kinds of changes, and they were trying to make the
(13:48):
Isle of Man TT circuit for GPL, and it turns out that there were
limits on how long the track couldbe, because I only needed to make
it long enough for the Nerboogring,which is not long enough the Aile of
Man, so that being too short. But you were doing all that for
fun. This was It's just thefun I spent. Well, yeah,
(14:09):
it became just about my life atsome point. I spent way too much
time doing it. But you weren'tgetting a paycheck for it. I was
not getting a paycheck for it.Absolutely not. So you are a regular
sim racer, got it? Yeah, except not racing, just yeah,
modifying stuff. So yeah, thatwas my background. And then I ended
up moving to the States, transferringover the States with one of my previous
companies, and my pure coincidence,ended up about ten minute drive away from
(14:35):
Eye Racing's office. So when Iended up looking for a new drab,
that's where we went. Yeah,until, where where are you from?
You're obviously not from the US.I'll come on, that can't be that
obvious. I am. I'm fromNew Zealand. I was going to get
South Boston, but no similar accent. It's worse. It's worse, all
(14:58):
right. Next we have Alex Sanders, Senior production associate. Alex, you
have an interesting way of getting startedwith the AI on I Racing, mainly
because I'd be rated you. Yougot started building some basic lines for us,
right yeah, um, way wayback in the day, almost three
years ago. Now, I guessm I Racing wanted to start doing the
(15:22):
AI and we just wanted to makesure that uh kind of the idealized line
for where the cars was was faster. So, um, me and me
and you met through a racing leagueand you said, hey, can you
try doing this? Um And fromwhat I thought was going to be like
a fifteen minute project once now Ihave a job and been m have been
(15:46):
doing it three years and there's likeno end in sight. There's still so
much more to do. Yeah,and and the specifics on that Alex had
to piece together the AI lines forthe Norch Life, which is we had
nobody on staff that could do it, and so he started out contracted out
that big project. The next thingyou know, Yeah, he works at
(16:07):
Eye Racing, so that's uh,that's pretty cool. We'll get into the
nitty gritty of some of that stuffa little bit later. And then last
of all, we've got Brent Foster, who's the newest guy on the team.
He's a vehicle production assistant and reallyhas grown from somebody that we thought
was just going to drive lines intoNow Brent, you do a lot of
car work, right, Uh?Yeah, probably at this point. Most
(16:30):
of what I do is working oncars for for the AI. Uh And
but yeah, basically I just tryto make sure that their car behaves the
same way that your car does.And how did you have an interesting background
as well? You kind of appliedfor this job out of your comfort zone,
a little bit from your your classicaltraining. Correct those words very strategically.
(16:55):
Yeah, to say it was outof my comfort zone, it's probably
a bit of an understand ement.Um. Yeah. So before starting at
Eye Racing just over two years ago, UM, I worked as a bassoonist.
Um. I played the bassoon andI made a living by um playing
(17:18):
in orchestras and um, you know, traveling around, uh, freelancing,
taking auditions. Um, That's that'swhat I did. But then when when
COVID started, all of that kindof work was non existent for quite a
while. Uh. And that's whenI started on Ie Racing as a member.
(17:45):
And I saw your job posting,Greg, and I read the description
and I thought why not, I'llsend my resume and and I thought for
sure that would be the end ofit. But then shortly thereafter I was
getting phone calls from you. I'mannoying like that. I guess that was
gonna say, Greg and be persistent, but annoying is probably a better lady
(18:07):
haveing Kevin Bobbitt joining the podcast.Brent was a Brent was a lot of
fun to hire. I remember thenight I called him. Leslie was a
big fan of his just because hisbackground was so off the wall, and
I remember when I called him offfrom the job. I made him work
for it a little bit, butuh definitely earned it. He's that we
(18:30):
give a pretty pretty hard test tothose that have to drive drive the car
on I Racing in any capacity,and it happened. The old test was
the portion of nine one cup carat Summit Point as part of it,
and you had to do a qualllap, which, Brent, that was
your car, right, Yeah.I mean it hadn't been for long,
but it was I think maybe maybea couple months before before this, I
(18:56):
decided that that was the car thatI wanted to race on I Racing.
So you know, it was stilldefinitely new to me, but I at
least had my mind wrapped around andI think you put down a big que
number, so that was that washelpful in you getting the job for sure.
So but do you still play?Do I still play? Yeah?
Yeah I do. I mean obviouslynot not like I used to, um,
(19:21):
you know, before my life revolvedaround it, and now obviously with
a full time job here at IRacing, that's a bit different. Um.
But you know I still do play. I still enjoy it, um,
And I mean yeah, it willalways be a big part of my
life. And I love playing music, love playing the bassoon. So yeah,
(19:45):
cool apartmental meetings start with him playingthe masterpiece of theater theme song.
Yeah every week we should national anthem, we should bring that in. Actually,
yeah, we need talent show duringthe production meeting on Mondays. All
right, So let's get into theiRacing and AI. It's a fairly new
addition to the service. Definitely hada lot of opinions on it when it
(20:08):
first dropped, but now we havegot a pretty substantial percentage of our of
our cars and tracks on there.If Saunders can probably quote it off the
top of his head, But whatmakes AI on Iye Racing different than maybe
on other titles, and it's justa roundtable discussion. Maybe kick it off
(20:30):
with Nigel what have what have you? Would have been some of your goals
as you did the base programming withour AI. Sure, so, I
guess um, you know it doesn'tbasic goals we do as bring up particulars
talked about we want the cars thatthe II are driving to behave the same
ways as the cars that you aredriving. And that's the challenge in itself.
(20:55):
And obviously we have a large varietyof cars in eye Racing, you
know, the range of capabilities.But I guess well, one thing that
I really wanted was for the AIdo not act too much like kind of
robots for a single thing that they'redoing, you know, exactly the same
(21:15):
lines lap after lap, So Ikind of wanted them to have a bit
of variety between them and also tomake the odd mistake here and there,
and for that not to be tookind of canned that they go too fast
into a corner, and they weretoo too fast into the corner, then
(21:36):
they would slide off things like that. So that's that's one of the things
that I've aimed for I think oneof the things that you've also accomplished better
than a lot of titles, andthat makes it more lifelike to play is
I preferred our little Ai folk ascheeky little guys because they'll press you.
They will not you know, andother other sims you can just you kind
(21:59):
of can figure out what they wherethey will fight you and where they won't
fight you. Ours pretty much willfight you all the time. I remember,
Alex, you're building the defend linesand trying to figure out what was
realistic and what made them, youknow, want to fight almost too much.
But what do you think, whatdo you think? I don't know
separates our our aire the like oneof the things that you've been proud to
(22:21):
work up. Yeah, I meanI kind of would would echo what Nigel
said. I like that they're they'reless robotic in than in some of the
other titles that I've played with.I don't have a ton of experience um
on other racing games, but um, for sure, when you screw around
with some of those, you seethat, you know, the lap ones
(22:41):
can be very robotic. Um,there can be you know, the other
the other cars are basically all thesame whereas we have a lot of a
lot of customization you can do tothe opponents to make them act differently.
UM and we really we can makea fun experience for the user kind of
(23:03):
regardless what kind of AI experience youwant to have. UM. You know,
if if you want to set themup to be like an official race
where you're, um, you know, running something longer and you want the
skill spread to be very tight,like it's you know, doing a real
race, you can do that.UM And if you want to do the
Greg Special where you slap a racetogether, you set the AI really low,
(23:27):
you start at the back, youmake like a three lap race and
you play hero mode, it workstoo. Nothing wrong with that at all,
No, And I think that's Ithink that's the point. Um.
AI can be anything you want itto be, UM and it and it
can do that. It can bemore flexible than you know, like our
(23:47):
official series racing. UM, You'reyou're gonna get kind of a very specific
experience doing that, and AI canbe more UM And I think I think
that's what's what's the neatest to me. And also UM seeing how it's how
it's grown over you know, thethree years that I've been involved in it.
(24:11):
Obviously, when we put out abuild, the the new content gets
a lot of attention, you know, new cars and new tracks going on
AI. But behavior wise, likewe're constantly tweaking on this, We're constantly
working on making it better, umand that that may not be as obvious,
it may not get as much attention. But yeah, I'm impressed at
(24:33):
at how we've how far we've comeum in the in the time that we've
been doing it. Yeah, it'sbeen interesting to see how it's grown as
a whole. As is kind ofan aside. When we started out,
we almost didn't know what to dowith it. Now it is a major
function of vehicle development, and wedo our best when we have new vehicles
coming out to to make our newvehicles and tracks to make them AI available
(24:56):
when it's appropriate when the dev cycleallow us for it. You know,
sometimes, as we saw with likethe Mercedes W thirteen, you know,
like the car was was done soclose to the to the release date,
there was no way to build AIin a form that was up to the
standard that you guys have developed andhashtag soon, hashtag soon. Yeah,
(25:17):
burying the lead there did you checkthat in. It's in, it's being
tested now confirmed from March, sure, yeah, I can. I'll confirm
it from March. Just don't don'tgive out my address or oh number or
anything like that in case something goeswrong. So, what are some of
the things that let's go back toproduction on this and anybody can chime in,
(25:37):
you know, what are some ofthe things that make developing AI on
iRacing some challenges and what are someof those those improvements that you're talking about
that we've made recently that has reallyjust improved the overall experience. I'll chime
in with a challenge. So,how's an eracing a very dynamic the you
(25:59):
know, the tie is a dynamic. The track heats up, um,
then the tires start wearing out andthe cars slow down, and trying to
get that to match across the AIis a huge challenge for the production guys.
So maybe they want to try menon those since they spend so much
time on it. Yeah, maybemaybe you'd like to talk about your recent
(26:22):
project. Yeah, okay, um, yeah, making sure that the AI
performs consistently, um, you know, relative to the car that they're driving
or the tracks that they're driving onis definitely a big challenge, and recently
I've been working through some of ourmost challenging tracks that we have. You
(26:48):
can say Darlington, you can sayDarlington, so yeah, Darlington is one
of them. Um So, Sofor Darlington, I I've had to go
through basically all of our big ovalcars um so, so like um,
the next Gen, the Gen sixNASCAR, the eighty seven's, the Exfinity
(27:12):
car, the trucks ARCA, andthe IRA eighteen and tweak them so that
they function properly at Darlington specifically.Um And fortunately I think I've been fairly
successful with that, and I've goneon to work through a few of our
(27:33):
other tracks that are causing us someissues. Well that's that's an interesting segue.
So let's talk about what makes youknow specifically? You know, whether
it's the Cup cars you know,and they're running different maybe a different tire
of different tracks, or on someof the open World cars that have track
specific aero packages, that's stuff thatall has to be accounted before. Yeah,
(27:56):
for sure, um, particularly withsome thing like a complex car like
either the Next Gen or the IRAeighteen. Uh, there's a ton of
different arrow packages that exist, differenttypes of tracks will have different tires,
um, So like obviously you won'trun the same tire at Martinsville that you
(28:17):
would add Daytona obviously, So thoseall those different sort of variables and need
to be accounted for in the AI. That's a lot of what we do
trying to get them to perform consistentlyacross all the tracks. So what are
some of these other incremental improvements otherthan you know, maybe it's just different
(28:38):
tire and arrow packages. You know, Nigel, you have really you know,
burnt the candle at both ends toimprove some of the like I say,
the cheeky behavior, the light.How do you bring AI to life
rather than just playing fallow the leader? Um? Okay, So I mean
obviously you want them to make passingattempts. So it's there's a lot of
(29:03):
basically just hard slog and they're tryingto see, you know what getting that
ALI to identify is is this aviable kind of passing opportunity or they're not
getting to dive down and time thingsright. And I'm sure they're still a
long way off perfect and a lotof that, but it's it's better than
it was when it started. AndI think, you know, compared to
(29:23):
other ALI and other games, it'sprobably pretty good. So it's just m
Yeah, I wish there was away to do it in some some simple
way we had some deep insight andsuddenly it would all work. But actually
it's just a lot of hard sloggoing through endless situations trying to get them
(29:45):
to do the right thing. Butalso it's also about the randomness. I
like to have them, you know, in a given situation, maybe sometimes
they'll attempt to move and other timesthey won't. They'll hang back and leave
it for some other time. SoI have a question and it has to
do with so we talk about howwe've been improving or you guys have been
improving AI, not just by addingcars and tracks, but you know,
(30:07):
improving the overall system. But whatabout when because I racing evolves, right,
So cars will get an update,they'll get new tires, they'll get
whatever, a new arrow package they'llget. You know, we just updated
the cup car. We were talkingabout the nine one cup car, but
we just did an update to thenine nine two cup car, for example,
which isn't a it's a quality oflife improvement. It's not a brand
(30:32):
new car. But does that meanyou guys have to redo everything on it?
Or like, where's the line?How many? How much can we
change on a car before you guyshave to get in and go, oh,
gotta do everything over again? It'san interesting question because it can vary
widely, obviously, So we justput out a patch that had the update
(30:53):
to the nine nine two cup likeyou mentioned, and also had a GT
three BP update and in in thisparticular case, because it really depends on
what the changes are. UM,the BOP update for the GT three's thankfully
did not require any additional AI work. The update to the nine two cup
(31:15):
car involved essentially doing the A forthat car over again, lovely. So
the short answer is it depends,which means you guys need to be intimately
involved in any time somebody else ismessing with one of your cars. Yeah,
and I guess I mentioned before that. Um. You know, behavioral
updates are a big part of whatgoes in and doesn't necessarily get the attention.
(31:38):
Car updates are a huge part ofit too, um and you know
you'll you'll see those in the releasenotes that you know, the GT three
class got an update to AI Drivertraining or however we phrase it, um,
that can frequently be a really bigdeal. Um. Generally speaking,
I would say, how many evercars we put out in a season that
(32:00):
are new, we've probably worked onat least that many, keeping up with
updates or um just improving them ifit's if it's something that that that's required
on. So yeah, they Asthe catalog of AI content has grown,
Um, you know, we dospend more and more time maintaining things and
(32:23):
updating things for sure, right,So so the real visible stuff in release
notes is, hey, we addedthis to aim. But to your point,
it's it. You may have hadto spend equally equalium kind of the
same amount of time on other carsjust to keep them where they were because
a different engineer decided they were goingto make that car better, which is
(32:45):
a good thing, right, Imean, it's good that we're making product
better. But at all it hasthis ripple effect, and I think members
probably don't realize how much goes intothat. It's not you just didn't do
a car two years ago and I'llnever look at it again. So yeah,
as usual, tires tend to bethe complicated thing. So if you're
doing a if GT three goes throughsome bop and we add, I don't
(33:08):
know, five kilos to one ofthe cars to bounce a bit. Well,
the ao is probably going to reactcorrectly to that five kilos and we'll
check it, but we probably don'tneed to do anything. But at the
very least you've got to run somelaps to make sure that it is Yeah,
yeah, you mispronounced that. Brenthas to run some laps. Yeah,
(33:29):
but if you change a tire,that's a it's a more complicated thing,
and the the AOI will try anddo the right thing, but there's
a fair chance that it's going toneed a little bit of tweaking. Brent.
How many times have you been doinga tire run to measure falloff and
and wadded it up two laps fromthe end and had to start all over?
Oh more than Yeah, Yeah,that's right. We're professionals here,
(33:52):
Greg, come on, Oh,that's That's one of the cool things about
I think there's role and not justwith Brandon Alex but with all the vpas
is the level of detail that goesin to take you know, tire development,
whether it's for the player car orwhether it's for the AI. Is
they do the long runs and andsometimes you waded up twenty nine laps into
(34:17):
a thirty lap run and there isno close enough. It is step away,
grab a drink, come back andstart it over. Because our members
are going to find this out.They're going to do the thirty lap run
times ten thousand or you know morepeople on a nightly basis, So we
have to do our due diligence orwe will be found out. And we
(34:38):
were not going to be found out. We're definitely going to put in the
effort because our members deserve that.Whether it's on the player car, whether
it's the AI, we want toprovide the best experience possible for however you
want to partake in eye racing.And I'm incredibly proud of the group that
we have. Everybody's bought into thatphilosophy and truly believes it on a daily
(34:58):
basis, and it's a it's areally cool group to work at because they
bring the lunch pail every day toget the job done. Alex, you
said you had you had another thingas far as behavior that that you think
is it's definitely worth pointing out.Yeah, I mean, I think one
of the things that's that's a reallygood example of how behaviorally we've improved over
(35:20):
time. UM. When I firststarted working on AI, the I didn't
defend at all. UM And ifyou've ever been in an official race,
you know that's that's not realistic.UM. And over time we added kind
of our first iteration of the theAI defensive behavior UM, where we added,
(35:42):
you know, the ability for themto move over take a defensive line
into corners. It was kind ofrough. It was very you know,
it is on or off. Theythey moved all the way over or they
didn't move over at all, UM. And that's something that we looked at.
UM. You know, we gotcommunity feedback. We do pay it
tention to that. You know,we I saw some of the guys that
(36:05):
create the videos on YouTube talking aboutreviews of our AI in particular and pointing
out strengths and weaknesses. And sowe we put in kind of our our
second major iteration of AI defensive behaviorin this this last build. And now
AI defensive behavior is a lot morevaried. They don't necessarily go all the
(36:27):
way to the other side of thetrack. They'll be variation between what cars
will do, how far they'll goover or even if they'll defend at all.
And I think that's just a reallynice example of the sort of behavioral
improvements that we make over time.You know, AI is is still very
much a work in progress where we'renot looking at any part of it and
saying this is it, this isgood enough, this is as good as
(36:51):
we can ever make it. We'realways trying to make it better, and
uh, yeah, I think Ithink that's a really nice example of it.
Yeah, I mean think you youknow, follow that up with what
Nigel's talking about, even future improvementswhere they will they'll do sins on you
will be a really nice touch,unless you're getting sent on and then you'll
probably be annoyed. But you know, realism, that's what That's what that
(37:14):
reset button for reset to previous sessionright there. I feel like it's a
common misconception about our AI is thateverything is completely line based in their slot
cars. You know, that's somethingI see people talk about every so often,
and our our AI is a lotmore complicated than that. Um you
(37:37):
can you know, if you justrun an AI race and you look at
the cars out there and where they'rerunning, there's variations between them. It's
something Nigel's done a great job onmaking them so that they're not just you
know in that Congo line going throughlike I've I've seen in some other titles.
Um, you know, they're notThey're not going to take lines that
(38:00):
that don't make sense. But youwill see variations even when all they're doing
is you know, cruising and circulating. I mean, obviously you'll see more
when they're trying to pass each otherdefending, but there is always some variation.
It's these are not lot cars.Yeah, I think that's you know,
you hit the nail on the head. It's one of those one of
the things that it makes us.It makes it so much more lifelike.
(38:22):
I said, you can you canjoin an AI race and you if somebody
was looking over your shoulder, there'sthey would not know for the most part,
whether you were online or whether you'replaying. It's the the AI.
So that's that's a huge tip ofthe cap to you to the three of
you on you know, the levelof detail that you guys go into on
on everything, whether it's tracker production, car production or or whatnot. It's
(38:43):
uh, it's pretty cool. Yeah, the lines you can cool them guidelines
really that's a bit more what theywhat they are. There's no line that
they follow. It's a line thatthey think about. Oh well, what's
some without giving away the farm hereand if we have to, But what
are some things that we're working onan AI and you know, to come
(39:05):
for the future. I know I'vebothered Nigel. I'm trying to get Nigel
to code it so when the AIbumps you or you bump the AI that
they flash their lights at you.But what are some other like cheeky improvements
that you know we've talked about doingor dare I even say other forms of
racing that we have thought about doing? Well, clearly, uh did racing
(39:27):
is on the on the roadmap.It's it's been a challenge, to be
honest, and that's that's the onlyreason that it's not out there yet as
we haven't got it to a pointwhere it can be released, but it's
it'll be there at some point intime. I don't think we can say
when. I guess Rallycross will probablycome come with that too. Well.
I know we've we've talked about UMgetting more options available for AI racing that
(39:52):
we have for other things. SoUM support for heat racing. It's something
that we're you know, we areworking on. We did, we did
not forget about it. We areactually working on that as well as things
like, um, you know,putting in green, white, checkered m
basically any of those options if ifyou can do it for hosted, the
(40:13):
goal is to eventually let you beable to do that for AI. UM.
We always have, you know,more content coming. Although that that
list is getting getting smaller and smaller. I thought of one more thing in
terms that's the cheekiness you're talking about. One thing I would there's not in
there that I would like to dois if the car has been trying to
pass you for like ten laps andjust can't find his way past that,
(40:35):
it gets increasingly bold, desperate,crazy dives down the ind So I take
you out that kind of stuffs.Yes, realism, We're gonna make them
wait ten laps or where I meantwo seconds, depending on who you are.
If it's can we code it soif it's Kevin Bobbitt, they just
(40:57):
send it every lap they if thenstatement really and then if I ever get
the lead, I automatically crashed likeI do. I thought that the Kevin
bobb at AI car was coded toonly driving the gravel. No, No,
that's his player car. Oh that'sjust hard to tell. Sometimes it's
so real you just don't know.And I think we'd we'd be your miss.
(41:20):
Uh. It's no secret that we'reworking on Rain on Eye Racing and
I was in the rain meeting youknow this week with Nigel in there.
That's going to be going to bepart of AIS. There's no way around
it. I think the ability toto recreate scenarios you know, from races
past or whatnot, or create yourown scenario from your imagination, or do
(41:43):
whatever you want. As Alex said, that's the great part about AI on
Eye Racing is you can make itwhatever you want, right Nigel, Yeah,
yeah, for sure, Um yeah, we really do want to get
to the point where anything you cando in a racing non you can do
AI as well. So for surethat's the goal. All right, guys,
(42:05):
Well, we appreciate you taking thetime. I know some of you
were more exuberant about joining the podcastthan others, but we got you all
here and that's all that counts,are all that matters. But yeah,
thanks again for taking the time anduh yeah, Kevin, let's getting back
to the show. All right,great, always great to sit down with
staff and talk about all of thedifferent layers that make I Racing what it
(42:28):
is. AI a fairly recent edition, but as you can see from these
three talking about it, there isa lot that goes on behind the scenes
that you can't even imagine. Uh, it's it's pretty cool to be a
small cog in in the production ofthat. That's yeah, it's it's pretty
great. Moving forward, E Sports, Uh tis the season for free agency,
(42:49):
Chris, for the E NASCAR CocolaI Racing Series, give me the
ding somebody, somebody give me thedingan can you get the bell? Sence
you're upstairs now, Kevin, sleepingright next to me. You're very upset,
you know. Yeah. Post isfine. Yeah, I'll start doing
the bell and post. We'll fixit in post. Oh great, wonderful.
(43:10):
But NASCAR cocole I Racing Series freeagency kicked off on Monday, Chris,
what is free agency for NASCAR?Yep? So the way NASCAR free
agency works is every year, allforty drivers that qualify for the series,
whether you're returning, whether you're new, whether you fell out beforehand or go
back in. Everybody's back in thepool. Um. You know, everybody
(43:35):
has an opportunity to either resign withthe team they were with or go talk
to any of the teams, whetherthey're new or returning. And there will
be definitely some new faces in theseries that get announced a little closer to
the opener at well, we gotthe clash at the end of the month,
but then the first point paying raceat Daytona in the middle of February.
So the drivers try to get whateverthey can get from the team owners.
(44:00):
The team owners try to put togetherthe best teams that they possibly can.
It'll be really interesting this year tosee which drivers end up changing teams,
if there were any big names movingaround, if we end up with
a lot of some bigger names thatjust stay in place. But you know,
there were always a handful of justtotal changeups in free agency. Last
(44:22):
year we saw a handful of bignames move around that we didn't expect.
We saw Bobby Zelenski go back toJoe Gibbs, for example, who he
had left a couple of years before, and then ended up paying that off
with a Championship four appearance. StevenWilson had left RFK and gone to Stuart
Hawes. Same thing also made theChampionship four. So it'll be interesting to
(44:42):
see how it changes up, whichdrivers end up moving around, which ones
end up staying in the same place, and with also a couple of top
driver retirements in the offseason, whoends up filling those seats as well.
So the r Racing socials will definitelyhave those announcements as they're coming out to
Malillo. I'm sure will be inthe entire NASCAR Press corps will be on
(45:04):
the beat this entire week. Bythe time this show gets out, I'm
sure a few of the first announcementsare going to be made, but it'll
be interesting to see who ends upwhere and how it changes the complexion of
the series. Yeah, I thinkthe free agency, but also just the
sheer number of new drivers that aregoing to be into the series this year.
You know, curious to see howthat's gonna shake things up. Now,
(45:27):
last year was really interesting, Chris, How many individual winners did we
have during this series? Well,we definitely had more than we could fit
in the playoffs because we had acouple of names that we're getting bounced out
and even fell outside of the Toptwenty. I mean the biggest one who
if you're a life or your heartbreaksfor is certainly ray Al Falla because Ray
is not actually back at the cokelevel this year, didn't quite make that
(45:52):
Top twenty cut and just had noluck at all in the Contender series.
And for the first time he's goingto have to go through the road to
pro he has been in every series. And actually, when we were putting
together the driver document for the teamsto study before free agency, you know,
he's the first name. And I'vegot this whole document lined up in
(46:12):
in design, so it's twenty linkedpages of text and everything, and so
raise the Ray was the first namealphabetically had to delete it broke the whole
document. So Ray get back inthere so I can so I can fix
it for twenty twenty four, pleaseand thank you, and one other thing.
On the e NASCAR Series, Iwanted to mention this. So this
weekend we have media Days. Sowe started doing this back in twenty twenty
(46:36):
where we get all the drivers inthe series together and basically we have some
meetings, but we the main purposeis to gather some content so we can
make the broadcast better. You know, you've seen it in our broadcast,
you've seen it in the real worldbroadcast. You know, the driver intros
and the drivers are coming out anddoing whatever. Somebody gets a win.
We'll have some things already already producedand ready to go, really kind of
(46:59):
to elevate the broadcast quality, tobring it to the next level of professionalism.
So nice that we can do thatagain. We started in twenty twenty
and then COVID hits. It washard to get everybody together, but we're
back at it. So looking forwardto that. Getting to see all the
drivers down in Charlotte this weekend,and then I'll have some great stuff for
the shows once I start. Anda special shout out to AUTO for handling
(47:22):
all of the booking on that Idid it the first time that we did
it and you almost quit. Ido seem to recall we had a closed
door meeting after we got Charlotte.Yes, it was. It was an
adventure. It was I guess Itimed my vacation well. Feel I feel
(47:45):
for AUTO. It's it's a lotof logistics to manage. It is well
worth it, though for the amountof content the last time we did it,
obviously you know we were able toget three years out of that use.
And it also speaks to the longevityof the drivers who make the Coke
Series and their ability to keep qualifyingback in, keep qualifying back in um
that we were able to reuse somuch for so long. But I'm sure
(48:07):
that the broadcast team, Drew Cisco, Sean Cory will love to have some
fresh headshots and videos and things likethat for twenty twenty three. So the
broadcast should look great this year.So if you're ANANASCAR driver, then talking
just specifically for you too, whenyou do your head shot, are you
mean mugging? Are you smiling?That's a good question. Yes, I
(48:30):
think I smile. I think Ismile. I think I think you'll get
you You'll get more notices that way, right, because you'd be like one
of the three, right, goagainst the grain. I don't know whatever
works. We're at just happy tohave some, you know, real real
photos of them, things like that. So m however they want to present
themselves, fine by me. Ithink you give me both and in my
(48:52):
case, whichever one, my beardis less colicky and we go with that.
Klicky. We really really scraped thebottom of websters today, haven't we
Well, I just I remember myhead shot from twenty twenty and I had
a beard Colick that nobody told meabout, and so I think, whenever
I use that headshot, I haveto photoshop it out. I hope we
(49:14):
get to use the lightsaber things again. Those were cool. Those were really
cool. I wasn't there, butI saw the videos, so those were
pretty cool. But we also haveWorld of Outlaws Sprint Cars still close series.
Chris Mondays at nine yep Mondays atnine, I racing World of Outlaws
(49:34):
car Quest Sprint Car Series. Sorrypause for the ding for the bell and
post. I should leave that partin definitely deliberately. Timothy Smith has been
on a tear this year, leadinglaps, leading laps, getting good finishes,
getting good finishes. Took the pointslead after Fairbury couldn't win a race.
(50:00):
Finally got it done at Cedar Lakeand held off Alex Berger on you
know, the multi time champion,the guy who's face should basically be on
the trophy as far as the seriesgoes, held him off to do it.
It's still close. They're still withinsingle digit points with only a few
races left, but they are bringingthe action with apologies to Lee Diffy when
(50:22):
it comes to that series and theyare really making it a close fight.
I can't wait to see what thelast few races turn out to be,
because I think it's gonna be Ithink it's going to be decided by single
digit points. I think it's goingto be decided by a couple of spots
at the end. If you,even if you are not a dirt racing
fan or a dirt oval fan,you should do yourself favor if you like
(50:42):
racing and tune in, even fora few minutes and watch one of these
races. It is some of thebest elbows out wheel the wheel racing you
can possibly imagine, and it's reallya great showcase for you know, what
we can do on I Racing.But it's just a ton of fun.
So they do a really great jobof it. So once again, Monday's
(51:04):
nine pm, go and check thatout. And I think that's that's about
it. Yeah, I mean it'sgonna be a big year, but we're
still kind of easing back in firstfirst couple of weeks of January, but
it is going to be is goingto be a heck of a busy year,
you know, It's a lot ofnews coming out of the NASCAR Champions
(51:29):
to Crown and World of Outlaws,big special events. We are going to
have so much to talk about inthe February show. We're gonna struggle to
keep it to an hour and ahalf. Looking forward to it. Well,
thanks for listening to this episode ofthe IRAS and Don Schiff, don't
forget to rate, review, andsubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and anywhere
else Chris has put this thing,Bert, Kevin, Bobba, and Chris
(51:51):
Leoni. I am Greg West andwe'll see you at Daytona
This week on the Eye Racing downShift. We're ready to ring in a
new year. Christ wants no morevacations. I'm just gonna delete that out
of the HR portal. It's specialevents season. Or if I'll actually set
me on the team and you calledme and ask if you could race,
and the AI guys join us totalk about all the ways you can use
I Racing AI. You set theAI really low, you start the back
(00:21):
and make like a three lap race, and you play hero mode. Nothing
wrong with that at all. Allthis and more, it's strap it.
Welcome to I Racing dash If Tammiels, Greg West, I'm back with the
boys, Kevin Bobbitt and Chris Leone. Got a great show for you to
day. It is special events seasonhere at I Racing. We've got a
(00:41):
lot of opportunities to go race,go race with your friends. Of the
coming weeks, We've got a niceinterview with not one, not two,
but the three members of our AIteam. They're gonna talk about developing AI,
what's coming, what they've been workingon, and just kind of the
whole process. I wish it wasa video interview so you could see Nigel's
hair since he you know, asas smart as Einstein and kind of looks
(01:03):
like him too. I got permissionto say that sort of, so it's
fine. And then we're gonna tellas long as HR doesn't listen to the
intro, we're fine. Now youwere there. He gave me verbal permission.
We're fine. Hey, we're gonnatalk about NASCAR free agency, get
kicked off this week and finished offtalking about the world of out Car,
(01:23):
world of Outlaw Sprint car series,things that go round and around on dirt,
which is Chris Leone's specialty, orso you think. So if you
listen to this podcast, how arewe doing? A voice awesome? Happy
New Year? Happy New Year?Have you written any checks wrong? Or
is that dating myself? Nobody writescheck right? One check a month to
(01:44):
my h o A, and I'mangry every month when I write did you
put the right year on it?Or did you write twenty two? Uh?
Well, I haven't returned it,so I'm gonna sue us. There
you go. Actually, I knowI dropped it off. It's like the
last day of December. I haven'twritten the January one yet, so I've
I've got an opportunity to screw itup. I'll report back. The first
(02:06):
news story that I saved of theyear I saved the document is twenty twenty
one, so I'm regressive. Wow, how proud of you right now?
That's awesome. You're two years behind. That's impressive, Chris, well done.
Well, you know, how doyou even make this meeting? Like?
I you know, I don't know. I mean, but if you've
(02:28):
ever shared a race track with me, you know that two years behind is
pretty modest. And yeah, that'sfair. Maybe we shouldn't let you take
all that time off over the holidays. It's too too long for your brain
to just shut down him. Yeah, and and my break was a disaster
too, so I probably should havegotten back to work quicker. Well lesson
learned. That's take a vacation again. Chris wants no more vacations. So
(02:50):
I'm just gonna delete that out ofthe HR portal and we're all set.
I said, problems solved, creativesolutions to complicated problems. What Kevin,
what'd you do over the holidays?Just? Uh, family and friends,
you know, just hanging out todo anything super exciting. Didn't go anywhere,
but the boys are home, whichis great. And uh hung out
what about you? Yeah, kindof same old, same old plant plants,
(03:14):
indoor golf and and doing a lotof I racing on on the uh
the current season Race Challenge hosted byChief Stewart nim Cross Bunch just picked up
a new series in that he guesswhat I'm racing? Does it have to
do with does it rhyme? WasSCHMOORSA? No? Oh no, rookie
street stocks. I'm in it.Yeah, for those that don't know,
(03:35):
we have we have taken a ruleout anybody can race rookie street stocks now.
So it's uh, it's because ofmy my B level oval license clearly,
UH made me too good for thatseries. Not um No, I'm
having fun in him though. They'requick, short races, um plenty of
time. I think they're every hour, you know, I just jump in
(03:57):
and go, um awesome any time. Looking updated car model too, so
you should drive that in VR bythe way, And I'm giving away lots
so I let you win awards becauselots of people are beating me. Kevin's
making it rain rookies day one onI Racing, you can earn an I'll
let you win a word a word. I can't talk. How cool is
that? Right? I'm I'm acommunity guy. You know I'm doing the
(04:18):
right thing. Magnanimous that's your wordof the day, right, Chris,
can you spell? That's no?That's no. No, we're not We're
not doing him. Need to stuffwith my agent, hippopotamus, agent manager.
(04:38):
I need seventy two hours clear spaceso I can get my head in
the game. Leslie, I thinkwe've already lost control of this podcast.
Leslie's addicted to the script spelling Bee, by the way, she's like the
biggest fan. She takes days off. She tweets at them, They tweet
back. It's that's her things.What word did you guys lose in your
elementary school spelling bees as a kid? Because is I lost on plagiarism because
(05:01):
I tried to spell it like plague. I lost on money. I thought,
you guys you copied somebody. ButI am never imitated, never duplicated.
And I'm beginning to wonder if theproblem is me. I guess I
want to talk about I racing?Sure? Why not? All right,
Well, I'm gonna read directly offChris's outline. Then he magnanimously supplied to
(05:25):
us thirty eight minutes ago with aboutten minutes notice. Uh, latest news
and special events in bold I Racingroar is this weekend one of the most
fun events you can do on IRacing. Uh. Not a team event,
solo. It's two point four hourskind of you know, tis the
(05:46):
season for things that are twenty fourhours, as we'll talk about in a
moment, but a really a reallyfun event for the community. We've got
the touring cars are going to beout there. We've got the brand new
Toyota GR eighty six cup car,and I think we got the GT fours.
I made this series and I justforgot that sounds correct? Yeah right,
(06:09):
you got it. I did it. Yeah yeah, shaking off the
holiday rust yeah yeah, well theten pounds you know, either either one
of those, but yeah, thatkicks off this weekend. Details in the
forums. We've got four races goingoff, four time slash I should say
going off and once again that's that'stwo point four hours of solo. Good
(06:31):
times around Daytona and the low poweredcars and Kevin. That's that's kind of
the dress rehearsal for the Eye RacingDaytona twenty four powered by Vco the first
race of the the VCO Grand Slam. They're back this year. Vico's big
sponsor of our special events. Greatto have them on board. They have
got Daytona this year, which hastraditionally been our biggest event. I think
(06:54):
right number ye, So looking forwardto that. Several staff teams UH participating.
We'll see if Greig can twist myarm or not, if I can,
or if he'll actually set me onthe team. Is really called me
and ask if you could race.We made room for you. I was
begging to be on the team andthat they're gonna let me like so,
man have some more so so youmight see some staff out there and maybe
(07:18):
we'll get a win or something.Who knows, maybe we'll just finish.
Probably not art. We're driving theP two and the staff one of the
staff cars, and we have everybodyfrom I think Brian Lockwood's got like an
eight thousand I R two and I'mnot trying to pick on you, Kevin,
but to Kevin Bobbitt, who's gotwhat two thousand? Being nice,
(07:42):
you're being nice. If we wantto round up, sure, but we'll
be right there in some middle split. It'll be it'll be entertaining. You
guys love me being on the teambecause I bring the average down. Yeah,
sure, well we'll go with that. No, but it should be
a VCO, right, And sothey're sponsoring again. They've got Sebring as
(08:05):
well, Watkins Glenn and Petite Lamp, so they're in for the four pack
this year. I wanted to finishthat thought. Sorry. Happens to be
the very similar to the Mitchelin EnduranceCup. Interesting how that works. Funny
how that works. So pretty excitedfor those races this year too. I
mean it's pretty much one for oneto what MPs is doing with the the
(08:28):
GTP car, the BMW being debutedin December. We have the LMP two
class covered with the dlar P twoseventeen, and we have the GTD or
GT three class as very well representedas well. So three classes are racing
this year in the Daytona twenty four. Really excited. I saw Doug on
Twitter having fun conversations with the withthe the Daytona twenty four Twitter handle.
(08:52):
It's it's pretty entertaining to watch themgo back and forth. So yeah,
very excited about that. So wehave once again this week we've got the
Roar next weekend, we've got theDayton of twenty four. Lots of opportunity
to spend way too much time onI Racing, so remember to spend a
lot of time. There's significant othersduring the week, so you're not in
(09:13):
trouble on the weekend. Pro tipon that. But we have our special
events calendar that there's a lot moreto it than just the special events.
And by just the special events,I think there's twenty six out of fifty
two this year or something like that, but we fifty two weeks. But
we also have a bunch of returningseries that are going to have their calendars
(09:33):
announced in the coming weeks. Nerburgringand Durance Championship, one of the most
popular series we have on I Racing, averaged over a thousand people every few
weeks racing around the Nerburgring, sothat will be back with nine races this
year. We've got the BMW Msim Cup, which details to be announced
(09:56):
coming soon unless Kevin wants to canyou remember from the negotiation, they're gonna
be BMW's in the series. Thereyou go. That's all the details we
can share right now. But it'scoming back. It'll be good, yeah,
very excited notice, he said,BMW's it's almost like there's more than
more than one. So maybe maybea format change from the series formerly known
(10:22):
as the the BMWSMGT Cup and thenof course very popular the Crevintic series the
twelve hour in durance races. There'sfour of those throughout the season, so
all of those calendars will be announcedin the coming weeks. I think my
favorite part about these calendars none ofthese events overlap, so you can do
all of them without any of themoverlapping. We have no more room in
(10:46):
the calendar. We are out ofspace. Anything after that, something's got
to give, but a lot ofwe need to make the year longer,
is what you're saying. Man,they're going by so fast. Go for
it. Happy, happy to fortiesaround the corner, my friend. So
all right, well we have agreat panel for our interview today. We
sat down Kevin and I just abouttwenty minutes ago with our AI development team
(11:11):
of Nigel Pattinson, Alexanders and BrentFoster. This is the team that the
team behind the team that make thoselittle little cars with the big hearts ratio
as hard as they do. Butthey sat down and discussed you know kind
of what goes into AI and youknow kind of what makes a tick.
So, without further ado, yeah, guys, all right, Kevin and
(11:33):
I are back and with a trioof guests. This time we had two
with Nigel and Tyler. We decidedto up the ante a little bit this
week with we've got Nigel Pattinson,Alexanders and Brent Foster. You may wonder
what do these three guys have incommon. While these are the guys behind
the AI on I racing, thisthe team behind the team per se.
(11:56):
So guys, welcome, welcome tothe show. Thanks for having us.
Hey, yep, gould to behit. All right, so let's go
around the room first of all andjust kind of introduce everybody. Uh So,
first of all, we'll start withNigel. Uh, you're a senior
software engineer. What do you do? Uh you know, what do you
do with AI? Well, Iguess I've done the coding, taking it
(12:18):
on from originally the codebase that wascame from NASCAR two thousand and three and
bringing it up to where it isis now just on the eyeslide. You
make that sound so simple. Um, yeah, it's it's been a challenge
at times, but it's it's it'smore more hard slog than anything too too
(12:43):
deep or perceptive. I think,what what did you do before or you
were here? Like what was yourjob? Oh, I've just said programming
jobs in recently C plus plus butin various different industries. Nothing not more
strict casing anything boring stuff. Again, I started kind of mucking around with
(13:07):
games, going back at least akind of Indy Car one and so I
don't know, I looked at thefile formats and did a few few tweaks.
Like I think in those days,the games had palettes and when you
try to take a track from oneof the games to another game, all
the colors would be wrong. SoI think I came out with some program
to fix up the colors. Butthen when GPL came out, that was
(13:28):
a pretty cool game, and soa lot of modifying that in various ways.
Supported some of the mods like thesixty nine cars that have got wings,
that have downforce, and it washad a big system for changing the
code and making all kinds of changes, and they were trying to make the
(13:48):
Isle of Man TT circuit for GPL, and it turns out that there were
limits on how long the track couldbe, because I only needed to make
it long enough for the Nerboogring,which is not long enough the Aile of
Man, so that being too short. But you were doing all that for
fun. This was It's just thefun I spent. Well, yeah,
(14:09):
it became just about my life atsome point. I spent way too much
time doing it. But you weren'tgetting a paycheck for it. I was
not getting a paycheck for it.Absolutely not. So you are a regular
sim racer, got it? Yeah, except not racing, just yeah,
modifying stuff. So yeah, thatwas my background. And then I ended
up moving to the States, transferringover the States with one of my previous
companies, and my pure coincidence,ended up about ten minute drive away from
(14:35):
Eye Racing's office. So when Iended up looking for a new drab,
that's where we went. Yeah,until, where where are you from?
You're obviously not from the US.I'll come on, that can't be that
obvious. I am. I'm fromNew Zealand. I was going to get
South Boston, but no similar accent. It's worse. It's worse, all
(14:58):
right. Next we have Alex Sanders, Senior production associate. Alex, you
have an interesting way of getting startedwith the AI on I Racing, mainly
because I'd be rated you. Yougot started building some basic lines for us,
right yeah, um, way wayback in the day, almost three
years ago. Now, I guessm I Racing wanted to start doing the
(15:22):
AI and we just wanted to makesure that uh kind of the idealized line
for where the cars was was faster. So, um, me and me
and you met through a racing leagueand you said, hey, can you
try doing this? Um And fromwhat I thought was going to be like
a fifteen minute project once now Ihave a job and been m have been
(15:46):
doing it three years and there's likeno end in sight. There's still so
much more to do. Yeah,and and the specifics on that Alex had
to piece together the AI lines forthe Norch Life, which is we had
nobody on staff that could do it, and so he started out contracted out
that big project. The next thingyou know, Yeah, he works at
(16:07):
Eye Racing, so that's uh,that's pretty cool. We'll get into the
nitty gritty of some of that stuffa little bit later. And then last
of all, we've got Brent Foster, who's the newest guy on the team.
He's a vehicle production assistant and reallyhas grown from somebody that we thought
was just going to drive lines intoNow Brent, you do a lot of
car work, right, Uh?Yeah, probably at this point. Most
(16:30):
of what I do is working oncars for for the AI. Uh And
but yeah, basically I just tryto make sure that their car behaves the
same way that your car does.And how did you have an interesting background
as well? You kind of appliedfor this job out of your comfort zone,
a little bit from your your classicaltraining. Correct those words very strategically.
(16:55):
Yeah, to say it was outof my comfort zone, it's probably
a bit of an understand ement.Um. Yeah. So before starting at
Eye Racing just over two years ago, UM, I worked as a bassoonist.
Um. I played the bassoon andI made a living by um playing
(17:18):
in orchestras and um, you know, traveling around, uh, freelancing,
taking auditions. Um, That's that'swhat I did. But then when when
COVID started, all of that kindof work was non existent for quite a
while. Uh. And that's whenI started on Ie Racing as a member.
(17:45):
And I saw your job posting,Greg, and I read the description
and I thought why not, I'llsend my resume and and I thought for
sure that would be the end ofit. But then shortly thereafter I was
getting phone calls from you. I'mannoying like that. I guess that was
gonna say, Greg and be persistent, but annoying is probably a better lady
(18:07):
haveing Kevin Bobbitt joining the podcast.Brent was a Brent was a lot of
fun to hire. I remember thenight I called him. Leslie was a
big fan of his just because hisbackground was so off the wall, and
I remember when I called him offfrom the job. I made him work
for it a little bit, butuh definitely earned it. He's that we
(18:30):
give a pretty pretty hard test tothose that have to drive drive the car
on I Racing in any capacity,and it happened. The old test was
the portion of nine one cup carat Summit Point as part of it,
and you had to do a qualllap, which, Brent, that was
your car, right, Yeah.I mean it hadn't been for long,
but it was I think maybe maybea couple months before before this, I
(18:56):
decided that that was the car thatI wanted to race on I Racing.
So you know, it was stilldefinitely new to me, but I at
least had my mind wrapped around andI think you put down a big que
number, so that was that washelpful in you getting the job for sure.
So but do you still play?Do I still play? Yeah?
Yeah I do. I mean obviouslynot not like I used to, um,
(19:21):
you know, before my life revolvedaround it, and now obviously with
a full time job here at IRacing, that's a bit different. Um.
But you know I still do play. I still enjoy it, um,
And I mean yeah, it willalways be a big part of my
life. And I love playing music, love playing the bassoon. So yeah,
(19:45):
cool apartmental meetings start with him playingthe masterpiece of theater theme song.
Yeah every week we should national anthem, we should bring that in. Actually,
yeah, we need talent show duringthe production meeting on Mondays. All
right, So let's get into theiRacing and AI. It's a fairly new
addition to the service. Definitely hada lot of opinions on it when it
(20:08):
first dropped, but now we havegot a pretty substantial percentage of our of
our cars and tracks on there.If Saunders can probably quote it off the
top of his head, But whatmakes AI on Iye Racing different than maybe
on other titles, and it's justa roundtable discussion. Maybe kick it off
(20:30):
with Nigel what have what have you? Would have been some of your goals
as you did the base programming withour AI. Sure, so, I
guess um, you know it doesn'tbasic goals we do as bring up particulars
talked about we want the cars thatthe II are driving to behave the same
ways as the cars that you aredriving. And that's the challenge in itself.
(20:55):
And obviously we have a large varietyof cars in eye Racing, you
know, the range of capabilities.But I guess well, one thing that
I really wanted was for the AIdo not act too much like kind of
robots for a single thing that they'redoing, you know, exactly the same
(21:15):
lines lap after lap, So Ikind of wanted them to have a bit
of variety between them and also tomake the odd mistake here and there,
and for that not to be tookind of canned that they go too fast
into a corner, and they weretoo too fast into the corner, then
(21:36):
they would slide off things like that. So that's that's one of the things
that I've aimed for I think oneof the things that you've also accomplished better
than a lot of titles, andthat makes it more lifelike to play is
I preferred our little Ai folk ascheeky little guys because they'll press you.
They will not you know, andother other sims you can just you kind
(21:59):
of can figure out what they wherethey will fight you and where they won't
fight you. Ours pretty much willfight you all the time. I remember,
Alex, you're building the defend linesand trying to figure out what was
realistic and what made them, youknow, want to fight almost too much.
But what do you think, whatdo you think? I don't know
separates our our aire the like oneof the things that you've been proud to
(22:21):
work up. Yeah, I meanI kind of would would echo what Nigel
said. I like that they're they'reless robotic in than in some of the
other titles that I've played with.I don't have a ton of experience um
on other racing games, but um, for sure, when you screw around
with some of those, you seethat, you know, the lap ones
(22:41):
can be very robotic. Um,there can be you know, the other
the other cars are basically all thesame whereas we have a lot of a
lot of customization you can do tothe opponents to make them act differently.
UM and we really we can makea fun experience for the user kind of
(23:03):
regardless what kind of AI experience youwant to have. UM. You know,
if if you want to set themup to be like an official race
where you're, um, you know, running something longer and you want the
skill spread to be very tight,like it's you know, doing a real
race, you can do that.UM And if you want to do the
Greg Special where you slap a racetogether, you set the AI really low,
(23:27):
you start at the back, youmake like a three lap race and
you play hero mode, it workstoo. Nothing wrong with that at all,
No, And I think that's Ithink that's the point. Um.
AI can be anything you want itto be, UM and it and it
can do that. It can bemore flexible than you know, like our
(23:47):
official series racing. UM, You'reyou're gonna get kind of a very specific
experience doing that, and AI canbe more UM And I think I think
that's what's what's the neatest to me. And also UM seeing how it's how
it's grown over you know, thethree years that I've been involved in it.
(24:11):
Obviously, when we put out abuild, the the new content gets
a lot of attention, you know, new cars and new tracks going on
AI. But behavior wise, likewe're constantly tweaking on this, We're constantly
working on making it better, umand that that may not be as obvious,
it may not get as much attention. But yeah, I'm impressed at
(24:33):
at how we've how far we've comeum in the in the time that we've
been doing it. Yeah, it'sbeen interesting to see how it's grown as
a whole. As is kind ofan aside. When we started out,
we almost didn't know what to dowith it. Now it is a major
function of vehicle development, and wedo our best when we have new vehicles
coming out to to make our newvehicles and tracks to make them AI available
(24:56):
when it's appropriate when the dev cycleallow us for it. You know,
sometimes, as we saw with likethe Mercedes W thirteen, you know,
like the car was was done soclose to the to the release date,
there was no way to build AIin a form that was up to the
standard that you guys have developed andhashtag soon, hashtag soon. Yeah,
(25:17):
burying the lead there did you checkthat in. It's in, it's being
tested now confirmed from March, sure, yeah, I can. I'll confirm
it from March. Just don't don'tgive out my address or oh number or
anything like that in case something goeswrong. So, what are some of
the things that let's go back toproduction on this and anybody can chime in,
(25:37):
you know, what are some ofthe things that make developing AI on
iRacing some challenges and what are someof those those improvements that you're talking about
that we've made recently that has reallyjust improved the overall experience. I'll chime
in with a challenge. So,how's an eracing a very dynamic the you
(25:59):
know, the tie is a dynamic. The track heats up, um,
then the tires start wearing out andthe cars slow down, and trying to
get that to match across the AIis a huge challenge for the production guys.
So maybe they want to try menon those since they spend so much
time on it. Yeah, maybemaybe you'd like to talk about your recent
(26:22):
project. Yeah, okay, um, yeah, making sure that the AI
performs consistently, um, you know, relative to the car that they're driving
or the tracks that they're driving onis definitely a big challenge, and recently
I've been working through some of ourmost challenging tracks that we have. You
(26:48):
can say Darlington, you can sayDarlington, so yeah, Darlington is one
of them. Um So, Sofor Darlington, I I've had to go
through basically all of our big ovalcars um so, so like um,
the next Gen, the Gen sixNASCAR, the eighty seven's, the Exfinity
(27:12):
car, the trucks ARCA, andthe IRA eighteen and tweak them so that
they function properly at Darlington specifically.Um And fortunately I think I've been fairly
successful with that, and I've goneon to work through a few of our
(27:33):
other tracks that are causing us someissues. Well that's that's an interesting segue.
So let's talk about what makes youknow specifically? You know, whether
it's the Cup cars you know,and they're running different maybe a different tire
of different tracks, or on someof the open World cars that have track
specific aero packages, that's stuff thatall has to be accounted before. Yeah,
(27:56):
for sure, um, particularly withsome thing like a complex car like
either the Next Gen or the IRAeighteen. Uh, there's a ton of
different arrow packages that exist, differenttypes of tracks will have different tires,
um, So like obviously you won'trun the same tire at Martinsville that you
(28:17):
would add Daytona obviously, So thoseall those different sort of variables and need
to be accounted for in the AI. That's a lot of what we do
trying to get them to perform consistentlyacross all the tracks. So what are
some of these other incremental improvements otherthan you know, maybe it's just different
(28:38):
tire and arrow packages. You know, Nigel, you have really you know,
burnt the candle at both ends toimprove some of the like I say,
the cheeky behavior, the light.How do you bring AI to life
rather than just playing fallow the leader? Um? Okay, So I mean
obviously you want them to make passingattempts. So it's there's a lot of
(29:03):
basically just hard slog and they're tryingto see, you know what getting that
ALI to identify is is this aviable kind of passing opportunity or they're not
getting to dive down and time thingsright. And I'm sure they're still a
long way off perfect and a lotof that, but it's it's better than
it was when it started. AndI think, you know, compared to
(29:23):
other ALI and other games, it'sprobably pretty good. So it's just m
Yeah, I wish there was away to do it in some some simple
way we had some deep insight andsuddenly it would all work. But actually
it's just a lot of hard sloggoing through endless situations trying to get them
(29:45):
to do the right thing. Butalso it's also about the randomness. I
like to have them, you know, in a given situation, maybe sometimes
they'll attempt to move and other timesthey won't. They'll hang back and leave
it for some other time. SoI have a question and it has to
do with so we talk about howwe've been improving or you guys have been
improving AI, not just by addingcars and tracks, but you know,
(30:07):
improving the overall system. But whatabout when because I racing evolves, right,
So cars will get an update,they'll get new tires, they'll get
whatever, a new arrow package they'llget. You know, we just updated
the cup car. We were talkingabout the nine one cup car, but
we just did an update to thenine nine two cup car, for example,
which isn't a it's a quality oflife improvement. It's not a brand
(30:32):
new car. But does that meanyou guys have to redo everything on it?
Or like, where's the line?How many? How much can we
change on a car before you guyshave to get in and go, oh,
gotta do everything over again? It'san interesting question because it can vary
widely, obviously, So we justput out a patch that had the update
(30:53):
to the nine nine two cup likeyou mentioned, and also had a GT
three BP update and in in thisparticular case, because it really depends on
what the changes are. UM,the BOP update for the GT three's thankfully
did not require any additional AI work. The update to the nine two cup
(31:15):
car involved essentially doing the A forthat car over again, lovely. So
the short answer is it depends,which means you guys need to be intimately
involved in any time somebody else ismessing with one of your cars. Yeah,
and I guess I mentioned before that. Um. You know, behavioral
updates are a big part of whatgoes in and doesn't necessarily get the attention.
(31:38):
Car updates are a huge part ofit too, um and you know
you'll you'll see those in the releasenotes that you know, the GT three
class got an update to AI Drivertraining or however we phrase it, um,
that can frequently be a really bigdeal. Um. Generally speaking,
I would say, how many evercars we put out in a season that
(32:00):
are new, we've probably worked onat least that many, keeping up with
updates or um just improving them ifit's if it's something that that that's required
on. So yeah, they Asthe catalog of AI content has grown,
Um, you know, we dospend more and more time maintaining things and
(32:23):
updating things for sure, right,So so the real visible stuff in release
notes is, hey, we addedthis to aim. But to your point,
it's it. You may have hadto spend equally equalium kind of the
same amount of time on other carsjust to keep them where they were because
a different engineer decided they were goingto make that car better, which is
(32:45):
a good thing, right, Imean, it's good that we're making product
better. But at all it hasthis ripple effect, and I think members
probably don't realize how much goes intothat. It's not you just didn't do
a car two years ago and I'llnever look at it again. So yeah,
as usual, tires tend to bethe complicated thing. So if you're
doing a if GT three goes throughsome bop and we add, I don't
(33:08):
know, five kilos to one ofthe cars to bounce a bit. Well,
the ao is probably going to reactcorrectly to that five kilos and we'll
check it, but we probably don'tneed to do anything. But at the
very least you've got to run somelaps to make sure that it is Yeah,
yeah, you mispronounced that. Brenthas to run some laps. Yeah,
(33:29):
but if you change a tire,that's a it's a more complicated thing,
and the the AOI will try anddo the right thing, but there's
a fair chance that it's going toneed a little bit of tweaking. Brent.
How many times have you been doinga tire run to measure falloff and
and wadded it up two laps fromthe end and had to start all over?
Oh more than Yeah, Yeah,that's right. We're professionals here,
(33:52):
Greg, come on, Oh,that's That's one of the cool things about
I think there's role and not justwith Brandon Alex but with all the vpas
is the level of detail that goesin to take you know, tire development,
whether it's for the player car orwhether it's for the AI. Is
they do the long runs and andsometimes you waded up twenty nine laps into
(34:17):
a thirty lap run and there isno close enough. It is step away,
grab a drink, come back andstart it over. Because our members
are going to find this out.They're going to do the thirty lap run
times ten thousand or you know morepeople on a nightly basis, So we
have to do our due diligence orwe will be found out. And we
(34:38):
were not going to be found out. We're definitely going to put in the
effort because our members deserve that.Whether it's on the player car, whether
it's the AI, we want toprovide the best experience possible for however you
want to partake in eye racing.And I'm incredibly proud of the group that
we have. Everybody's bought into thatphilosophy and truly believes it on a daily
(34:58):
basis, and it's a it's areally cool group to work at because they
bring the lunch pail every day toget the job done. Alex, you
said you had you had another thingas far as behavior that that you think
is it's definitely worth pointing out.Yeah, I mean, I think one
of the things that's that's a reallygood example of how behaviorally we've improved over
(35:20):
time. UM. When I firststarted working on AI, the I didn't
defend at all. UM And ifyou've ever been in an official race,
you know that's that's not realistic.UM. And over time we added kind
of our first iteration of the theAI defensive behavior UM, where we added,
(35:42):
you know, the ability for themto move over take a defensive line
into corners. It was kind ofrough. It was very you know,
it is on or off. Theythey moved all the way over or they
didn't move over at all, UM. And that's something that we looked at.
UM. You know, we gotcommunity feedback. We do pay it
tention to that. You know,we I saw some of the guys that
(36:05):
create the videos on YouTube talking aboutreviews of our AI in particular and pointing
out strengths and weaknesses. And sowe we put in kind of our our
second major iteration of AI defensive behaviorin this this last build. And now
AI defensive behavior is a lot morevaried. They don't necessarily go all the
(36:27):
way to the other side of thetrack. They'll be variation between what cars
will do, how far they'll goover or even if they'll defend at all.
And I think that's just a reallynice example of the sort of behavioral
improvements that we make over time.You know, AI is is still very
much a work in progress where we'renot looking at any part of it and
saying this is it, this isgood enough, this is as good as
(36:51):
we can ever make it. We'realways trying to make it better, and
uh, yeah, I think Ithink that's a really nice example of it.
Yeah, I mean think you youknow, follow that up with what
Nigel's talking about, even future improvementswhere they will they'll do sins on you
will be a really nice touch,unless you're getting sent on and then you'll
probably be annoyed. But you know, realism, that's what That's what that
(37:14):
reset button for reset to previous sessionright there. I feel like it's a
common misconception about our AI is thateverything is completely line based in their slot
cars. You know, that's somethingI see people talk about every so often,
and our our AI is a lotmore complicated than that. Um you
(37:37):
can you know, if you justrun an AI race and you look at
the cars out there and where they'rerunning, there's variations between them. It's
something Nigel's done a great job onmaking them so that they're not just you
know in that Congo line going throughlike I've I've seen in some other titles.
Um, you know, they're notThey're not going to take lines that
(38:00):
that don't make sense. But youwill see variations even when all they're doing
is you know, cruising and circulating. I mean, obviously you'll see more
when they're trying to pass each otherdefending, but there is always some variation.
It's these are not lot cars.Yeah, I think that's you know,
you hit the nail on the head. It's one of those one of
the things that it makes us.It makes it so much more lifelike.
(38:22):
I said, you can you canjoin an AI race and you if somebody
was looking over your shoulder, there'sthey would not know for the most part,
whether you were online or whether you'replaying. It's the the AI.
So that's that's a huge tip ofthe cap to you to the three of
you on you know, the levelof detail that you guys go into on
on everything, whether it's tracker production, car production or or whatnot. It's
(38:43):
uh, it's pretty cool. Yeah, the lines you can cool them guidelines
really that's a bit more what theywhat they are. There's no line that
they follow. It's a line thatthey think about. Oh well, what's
some without giving away the farm hereand if we have to, But what
are some things that we're working onan AI and you know, to come
(39:05):
for the future. I know I'vebothered Nigel. I'm trying to get Nigel
to code it so when the AIbumps you or you bump the AI that
they flash their lights at you.But what are some other like cheeky improvements
that you know we've talked about doingor dare I even say other forms of
racing that we have thought about doing? Well, clearly, uh did racing
(39:27):
is on the on the roadmap.It's it's been a challenge, to be
honest, and that's that's the onlyreason that it's not out there yet as
we haven't got it to a pointwhere it can be released, but it's
it'll be there at some point intime. I don't think we can say
when. I guess Rallycross will probablycome come with that too. Well.
I know we've we've talked about UMgetting more options available for AI racing that
(39:52):
we have for other things. SoUM support for heat racing. It's something
that we're you know, we areworking on. We did, we did
not forget about it. We areactually working on that as well as things
like, um, you know,putting in green, white, checkered m
basically any of those options if ifyou can do it for hosted, the
(40:13):
goal is to eventually let you beable to do that for AI. UM.
We always have, you know,more content coming. Although that that
list is getting getting smaller and smaller. I thought of one more thing in
terms that's the cheekiness you're talking about. One thing I would there's not in
there that I would like to dois if the car has been trying to
pass you for like ten laps andjust can't find his way past that,
(40:35):
it gets increasingly bold, desperate,crazy dives down the ind So I take
you out that kind of stuffs.Yes, realism, We're gonna make them
wait ten laps or where I meantwo seconds, depending on who you are.
If it's can we code it soif it's Kevin Bobbitt, they just
(40:57):
send it every lap they if thenstatement really and then if I ever get
the lead, I automatically crashed likeI do. I thought that the Kevin
bobb at AI car was coded toonly driving the gravel. No, No,
that's his player car. Oh that'sjust hard to tell. Sometimes it's
so real you just don't know.And I think we'd we'd be your miss.
(41:20):
Uh. It's no secret that we'reworking on Rain on Eye Racing and
I was in the rain meeting youknow this week with Nigel in there.
That's going to be going to bepart of AIS. There's no way around
it. I think the ability toto recreate scenarios you know, from races
past or whatnot, or create yourown scenario from your imagination, or do
(41:43):
whatever you want. As Alex said, that's the great part about AI on
Eye Racing is you can make itwhatever you want, right Nigel, Yeah,
yeah, for sure, Um yeah, we really do want to get
to the point where anything you cando in a racing non you can do
AI as well. So for surethat's the goal. All right, guys,
(42:05):
Well, we appreciate you taking thetime. I know some of you
were more exuberant about joining the podcastthan others, but we got you all
here and that's all that counts,are all that matters. But yeah,
thanks again for taking the time anduh yeah, Kevin, let's getting back
to the show. All right,great, always great to sit down with
staff and talk about all of thedifferent layers that make I Racing what it
(42:28):
is. AI a fairly recent edition, but as you can see from these
three talking about it, there isa lot that goes on behind the scenes
that you can't even imagine. Uh, it's it's pretty cool to be a
small cog in in the production ofthat. That's yeah, it's it's pretty
great. Moving forward, E Sports, Uh tis the season for free agency,
(42:49):
Chris, for the E NASCAR CocolaI Racing Series, give me the
ding somebody, somebody give me thedingan can you get the bell? Sence
you're upstairs now, Kevin, sleepingright next to me. You're very upset,
you know. Yeah. Post isfine. Yeah, I'll start doing
the bell and post. We'll fixit in post. Oh great, wonderful.
(43:10):
But NASCAR cocole I Racing Series freeagency kicked off on Monday, Chris,
what is free agency for NASCAR?Yep? So the way NASCAR free
agency works is every year, allforty drivers that qualify for the series,
whether you're returning, whether you're new, whether you fell out beforehand or go
back in. Everybody's back in thepool. Um. You know, everybody
(43:35):
has an opportunity to either resign withthe team they were with or go talk
to any of the teams, whetherthey're new or returning. And there will
be definitely some new faces in theseries that get announced a little closer to
the opener at well, we gotthe clash at the end of the month,
but then the first point paying raceat Daytona in the middle of February.
So the drivers try to get whateverthey can get from the team owners.
(44:00):
The team owners try to put togetherthe best teams that they possibly can.
It'll be really interesting this year tosee which drivers end up changing teams,
if there were any big names movingaround, if we end up with
a lot of some bigger names thatjust stay in place. But you know,
there were always a handful of justtotal changeups in free agency. Last
(44:22):
year we saw a handful of bignames move around that we didn't expect.
We saw Bobby Zelenski go back toJoe Gibbs, for example, who he
had left a couple of years before, and then ended up paying that off
with a Championship four appearance. StevenWilson had left RFK and gone to Stuart
Hawes. Same thing also made theChampionship four. So it'll be interesting to
(44:42):
see how it changes up, whichdrivers end up moving around, which ones
end up staying in the same place, and with also a couple of top
driver retirements in the offseason, whoends up filling those seats as well.
So the r Racing socials will definitelyhave those announcements as they're coming out to
Malillo. I'm sure will be inthe entire NASCAR Press corps will be on
(45:04):
the beat this entire week. Bythe time this show gets out, I'm
sure a few of the first announcementsare going to be made, but it'll
be interesting to see who ends upwhere and how it changes the complexion of
the series. Yeah, I thinkthe free agency, but also just the
sheer number of new drivers that aregoing to be into the series this year.
You know, curious to see howthat's gonna shake things up. Now,
(45:27):
last year was really interesting, Chris, How many individual winners did we
have during this series? Well,we definitely had more than we could fit
in the playoffs because we had acouple of names that we're getting bounced out
and even fell outside of the Toptwenty. I mean the biggest one who
if you're a life or your heartbreaksfor is certainly ray Al Falla because Ray
is not actually back at the cokelevel this year, didn't quite make that
(45:52):
Top twenty cut and just had noluck at all in the Contender series.
And for the first time he's goingto have to go through the road to
pro he has been in every series. And actually, when we were putting
together the driver document for the teamsto study before free agency, you know,
he's the first name. And I'vegot this whole document lined up in
(46:12):
in design, so it's twenty linkedpages of text and everything, and so
raise the Ray was the first namealphabetically had to delete it broke the whole
document. So Ray get back inthere so I can so I can fix
it for twenty twenty four, pleaseand thank you, and one other thing.
On the e NASCAR Series, Iwanted to mention this. So this
weekend we have media Days. Sowe started doing this back in twenty twenty
(46:36):
where we get all the drivers inthe series together and basically we have some
meetings, but we the main purposeis to gather some content so we can
make the broadcast better. You know, you've seen it in our broadcast,
you've seen it in the real worldbroadcast. You know, the driver intros
and the drivers are coming out anddoing whatever. Somebody gets a win.
We'll have some things already already producedand ready to go, really kind of
(46:59):
to elevate the broadcast quality, tobring it to the next level of professionalism.
So nice that we can do thatagain. We started in twenty twenty
and then COVID hits. It washard to get everybody together, but we're
back at it. So looking forwardto that. Getting to see all the
drivers down in Charlotte this weekend,and then I'll have some great stuff for
the shows once I start. Anda special shout out to AUTO for handling
(47:22):
all of the booking on that Idid it the first time that we did
it and you almost quit. Ido seem to recall we had a closed
door meeting after we got Charlotte.Yes, it was. It was an
adventure. It was I guess Itimed my vacation well. Feel I feel
(47:45):
for AUTO. It's it's a lotof logistics to manage. It is well
worth it, though for the amountof content the last time we did it,
obviously you know we were able toget three years out of that use.
And it also speaks to the longevityof the drivers who make the Coke
Series and their ability to keep qualifyingback in, keep qualifying back in um
that we were able to reuse somuch for so long. But I'm sure
(48:07):
that the broadcast team, Drew Cisco, Sean Cory will love to have some
fresh headshots and videos and things likethat for twenty twenty three. So the
broadcast should look great this year.So if you're ANANASCAR driver, then talking
just specifically for you too, whenyou do your head shot, are you
mean mugging? Are you smiling?That's a good question. Yes, I
(48:30):
think I smile. I think Ismile. I think I think you'll get
you You'll get more notices that way, right, because you'd be like one
of the three, right, goagainst the grain. I don't know whatever
works. We're at just happy tohave some, you know, real real
photos of them, things like that. So m however they want to present
themselves, fine by me. Ithink you give me both and in my
(48:52):
case, whichever one, my beardis less colicky and we go with that.
Klicky. We really really scraped thebottom of websters today, haven't we
Well, I just I remember myhead shot from twenty twenty and I had
a beard Colick that nobody told meabout, and so I think, whenever
I use that headshot, I haveto photoshop it out. I hope we
(49:14):
get to use the lightsaber things again. Those were cool. Those were really
cool. I wasn't there, butI saw the videos, so those were
pretty cool. But we also haveWorld of Outlaws Sprint Cars still close series.
Chris Mondays at nine yep Mondays atnine, I racing World of Outlaws
(49:34):
car Quest Sprint Car Series. Sorrypause for the ding for the bell and
post. I should leave that partin definitely deliberately. Timothy Smith has been
on a tear this year, leadinglaps, leading laps, getting good finishes,
getting good finishes. Took the pointslead after Fairbury couldn't win a race.
(50:00):
Finally got it done at Cedar Lakeand held off Alex Berger on you
know, the multi time champion,the guy who's face should basically be on
the trophy as far as the seriesgoes, held him off to do it.
It's still close. They're still withinsingle digit points with only a few
races left, but they are bringingthe action with apologies to Lee Diffy when
(50:22):
it comes to that series and theyare really making it a close fight.
I can't wait to see what thelast few races turn out to be,
because I think it's gonna be Ithink it's going to be decided by single
digit points. I think it's goingto be decided by a couple of spots
at the end. If you,even if you are not a dirt racing
fan or a dirt oval fan,you should do yourself favor if you like
(50:42):
racing and tune in, even fora few minutes and watch one of these
races. It is some of thebest elbows out wheel the wheel racing you
can possibly imagine, and it's reallya great showcase for you know, what
we can do on I Racing.But it's just a ton of fun.
So they do a really great jobof it. So once again, Monday's
(51:04):
nine pm, go and check thatout. And I think that's that's about
it. Yeah, I mean it'sgonna be a big year, but we're
still kind of easing back in firstfirst couple of weeks of January, but
it is going to be is goingto be a heck of a busy year,
you know, It's a lot ofnews coming out of the NASCAR Champions
(51:29):
to Crown and World of Outlaws,big special events. We are going to
have so much to talk about inthe February show. We're gonna struggle to
keep it to an hour and ahalf. Looking forward to it. Well,
thanks for listening to this episode ofthe IRAS and Don Schiff, don't
forget to rate, review, andsubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and anywhere
else Chris has put this thing,Bert, Kevin, Bobba, and Chris
(51:51):
Leoni. I am Greg West andwe'll see you at Daytona
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
New Heights with Jason & Travis Kelce
Football’s funniest family duo — Jason Kelce of the Philadelphia Eagles and Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs — team up to provide next-level access to life in the league as it unfolds. The two brothers and Super Bowl champions drop weekly insights about the weekly slate of games and share their INSIDE perspectives on trending NFL news and sports headlines. They also endlessly rag on each other as brothers do, chat the latest in pop culture and welcome some very popular and well-known friends to chat with them. Check out new episodes every Wednesday. Follow New Heights on the Wondery App, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to new episodes early and ad-free, and get exclusive content on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And join our new membership for a unique fan experience by going to the New Heights YouTube channel now!
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.