Drivatar Lessons | Statistics | Observe | Free Training | Head-to-Head | Career Races | Maturity | Copying Drivatars | Learning From Your Drivatar

Introduction

Remember the days when games came with nice big manuals you could read at bedtime? The pamphlets we all get these days are OK and just about fit-for-purpose, but they don’t really tell us as much as we’d like. That’s why we put together this article. Consider this page an extension to the unavoidably concise Drivatar section in the Forza Motorsport manual.

The "Drivatar" – what is it? 

We’d suggest you think of your Drivatar as a clone of yourself. It is a replicant, a Driving Avatar made to your very own recipe. You teach it to drive like you do and you can keep on training it until it reaches the dizzy heights of perfection. Well, as perfect as you can make it that is. Drivatars are rather like your own culinary concoctions, they’re only as good as you are and whilst you may have followed the recipe from the TV-chef-of-the-moment’s new book to the letter, that Moroccan-lamb-served-on-a-bed-of-organic-rice-and-sunflower-seeds will always have your own unique slant on the theme. Drive erratically, braking and apexing too late and so will your Drivatar. Drive consistently with early braking, fast apexing and fast corner exit and so will your Drivatar. It really is a realistic model of your own driving skills.

Why create a Drivatar? What will it do for me? 

What is it for? Well aside from being a really interesting scientific subject for "research", it’s a novel addition to the gameplay of Forza. For one thing, all those computer opponents in "Career" and "Arcade" races are Drivatars that were pre-trained by computer — that’s one of the reasons why they drive far more realistically than typically seen in racing games. For another, you can employ (for a fee, of course) Drivatars to race for you in any Career Races that you’re having trouble with or don’t want to bother with (did I hear someone say "endurance"?). You can even pursue an entire career via your Drivatar. For some real fun though you can create a custom race in Head to Head using any combination of cars, tracks and drivers — including friends' Drivatars, your own Drivatars and the standard AI opponents in the game.

Hopefully we’ve convinced you that training a Drivatar is worthwhile, so let’s take a look in more detail at how it is done…

Drivatar Lessons

When you first create your Drivatar, he/she knows nothing about your driving style and you need to take time to nurture your protegé. Now obviously it would be nice to take it down to the local pub (bar) and spend an evening discussing your racing philosophy but the easiest way to teach it to race like you is to invite it into the passenger seat of a few different cars and let him/her observe how you drive.

Forza’s approach to getting you to spend quality time with your Drivatar is to impose five lessons on you. (Hey! that’s a lot less than some other driving games ). You get to take your Drivatar out in a cunningly selected variety of cars on an even more cunningly selected variety of tracks. In fact, if you’re itching to test drive a Class R car and haven’t had time to unlock everything in the game yet then this is a sly backdoor into achieving just that since you’ll get to drive an Audi R8 in lesson five! The lessons are devilishly cunning because they shoe-horn you into teaching your Drivatar how you drive a representative sample of corner types that appear throughout the game. These corner types are listed in the manual for you and once you’ve completed all five lessons you’ll have taught your Drivatar how you drive each and every corner type in the game (with the exception of one – see Free Training to fix that). More importantly, you will have taught your Drivatar some key characteristics of your driving style:

• Variety – how consistent are you?
• Line – how smoothly do you guide the car around corners and through combinations thereof?
• Entry speeds and braking points — how early do you brake before entering a corner? Are you conservative? Reckless?
• Apex speeds and positions — how close are you to the apex of the corner and how fast are you going?
• Exit Speeds and acceleration points — when do you start accelerating as you leave a corner and how well have you maintained your speed around the corner?

We use all this information to learn a model of your driving characteristics and that model is what drives the Drivatar.

The lessons are a pretty good way of learning some of the tracks and how to drive, as well as the route to training your Drivatar. You’ve got full ghost access, you’ve got the Scores (see below), the lap times, best laps — a veritable cornucopia of information on how to improve your driving. Think of the lessons as a cunningly disguised "driving school" as well as the implementation of what we'd like to claim is the most sophisticated "machine learning" ever seen in a video game!

You'll have seen that each lesson is three laps. There’s a reason for that — we need a representative sample of your driving style to learn a driving model and three laps is pretty much the minimum useful amount of data. Ideally, to build a better model of your driving we need more, and indeed if you train further on the same track, your Drivatar will make use of that additional data.

You can quit a lesson early and depending on how many laps you have completed, there are two possible outcomes:

• You will be informed that you have provided insufficient data for your Drivatar to learn anything useful, and your Drivatar will not be updated. Typically you need to complete a little more than one lap of good (i.e. mainly on the track!) driving, though the game is a little less strict on the Nurburgring.
• You will have contributed to the Drivatar’s training (your data will be assimilated by the model), but you won’t have completed the lesson and you’ll have to try again at another time.

Once you have completed a lesson (i.e. the full 3 laps) a giant blue tick mark will scythe through the lesson icon – this doesn’t mean you can’t do it again though: feel free to repeat and improve.

Once you have completed all five lessons your Drivatar is considered “Mature”. That’s the term we use to indicate that it has had sufficient training to reproduce a reasonable approximation to your driving. You shouldn’t consider your Drivatar complete at this stage (far from it!) — that’s why we use the term “mature”, it indicates it has progressed from its enthusiastic teens and into the first flush of adulthood. You’ll now see some more menu options unlocked: Free Training and Head to Head. You’ll also now be able to employ your Drivatar to race for you in Career Races should you so choose. More on this later. Coming back to the point on completing your Drivatar, we should point out that a Drivatar is never really “complete”, it can always be improved. You’d be surprised how much your own style progresses as you progress through the game and how you make subtle changes in different cars and on different tracks. Drivatars are like a partner, you need to give them constant love and attention to get the best from them. You can skip the chocolates though.

Scores on the Doors

As covered in the printed Forza manual, as you train your Drivatar, you are graded on how well you drive certain types of corner on each track. Let’s talk a little more about those scores.

When you create your Drivatar you’ll see a menu option on the Drivatar menu called “Statistics”. If you visit this screen before you begin the lessons you’ll see three tabs:

• A "Career" summary page showing "Distance Driven" etc. Note (slightly confusingly!) that all these statistics here refer to Career Races driven by that Drivatar not the amount of driving during training.
• A summary of the Drivatar's turn abilities. This is specific to the training.
• A summary of the Drivatar's ability in various car categories, again specific to training.

The second tab is probably the most important — it lists all the corner types categorised in the game ("Kink", "Constant Radius" etc) along with your current average scores. These are all 0% to begin with. As you train your Drivatar, either via "Drivatar Lessons" or "Free Training", these scores will change. They are the current values of the running averages of the scores you have achieved for each corner type and will change rapidly to begin with but, being averages, obviously stabilise the more you drive. Let’s take a look at one of those score messages you might see in the game:

“Constant Radius 73% (+5)”

Obviously the first part refers to the corner you just drove around. The “73%” refers to the absolute score you just achieved for that single corner. The “(+5)” refers to the fact that, compared to your score at the start of the race, you improved by a margin of 5%. Your previous score of record therefore was 68% — though the messages are rounded to the nearest whole number.

The 73% is calculated based on a number of key characteristics concerning the line and speed maintained through the corner. Roughly speaking, percentage points are awarded for entry speed, exit speed, closeness to apex, smoothness of line and time taken through the corner. Note that you don't have to be perfect according to all these metrics in order to score 100%.

Now, the talented drivers amongst you will rightly be shouting “but I drove that corner perfectly and didn't get 100%”. That’s a fair comment, since no scoring system can be perfect, and Drivatar Statistics are no exception. But you’ll also appreciate that for the majority of people for the majority of the time it gives a very reasonable and meaningful score. If you are genuinely talented (and that doesn’t mean 50% of you!!) then you shouldn’t get too hung up on your scores. In particular, please note that the scores are only indicative. The Drivatar itself isn’t concerned with the scores; it is concerned with your speed and position at every point on the track and of course your consistency. The scores are just a useful indicator of how well most people are doing and do not directly affect how well your Drivatar will perform in races.

Note that if, at the end of a lesson or some free training, you choose to "discard" your efforts, your statistics will not be updated.

Observe

Once you have completed at least one Drivatar lesson, entering "Observe" mode allows you to watch your Drivatar drive on any of the five tracks where the lessons have been completed. This allows you to assess you Drivatar's performance and perhaps see how your own driving might be improved to take advantage of any traits you observe in your Drivatar. Once you have completed all the lessons and your Drivatar is mature you’ll be able to watch him/her drive at any circuit in the game (another cunning back door — this time to checking out the locked tracks in the game) in any car in your garage. This is where you can start to appreciate the technology behind the Drivatar. The Drivatar is not a simple recording of your driving specific to the track and car combination from the lessons. Instead, your Drivatar infers a probabilistic model of your "style" of driving in general by monitoring your line with respect to the geometry of the track, and your speed with respect to the capabilities of your car.

Think about it ... you’ve trained your Drivatar to drive on only five different tracks in five particular cars and now it is able to drive all the tracks in the game in all cars — though effectively it has never experienced them before. If you think that’s simple, think again! For even the most menial of real world tasks we typically have to provide thousands of examples of data to get a computer to "learn" successfully. So as you might imagine, we had to utilise some seriously hardcore "machine learning" research voodoo to get the Drivatar system to work as effectively as it does here with such little training data.

Free Training

Once you have completed all the Drivatar lessons and your Drivatar is mature, "Free Training" is unlocked and you are able to continue training it on any track in the game using any car in your garage. This is where your Drivatar can start to really work for you. The more you train it, the better it will get.

The most noticeable change will come if you train it at new tracks it hasn’t raced before. After the lessons are complete, try observing your Drivatar at Laguna Seca for example. It’ll do OK, perhaps as well or better than you would when driving that circuit for the very first time. But, of course, the expert driver requires specific knowledge and experience of the idiosyncrasies of a given track to really perform well and the infamous “corkscrew” at Laguna Seca is a great example. Make a note of the best observed lap time your Drivatar achieves at Laguna Seca and then do some training there. Repeat the observe experiment and, assuming a reasonable level of competence on the part of the trainer , you should see the best lap time improve significantly. To get the very best from your Drivatar, you really need to consider repeatedly adding to its training as you progress through the game and turn your attentions to specific cars and events. For example, your initial training at Tsukuba in the Ford Focus will allow your Drivatar to drive a Porsche GT3 there reasonably well but once you have progressed to that class of car in the game, you’ll really need to refresh the training to get the very best from your Drivatar at that level.

Also, Free Training is the place where you can update your Statistics and get scores for any corner type(s) not included in the tracks featured in the lessons.

Head to Head

Head to Head racing is easy to overlook in Forza given the vast swathes of arcade races, career races and online options open to you, but this is an innovative and exciting feature of the game. When was the last time you could completely customise a race to your precise requirements? Not only can you customise the track and the field of cars, you can personalise each and every driver. A great way to use the Head to Head races is to race your friends' Drivatars — simply get them to copy their Drivatar to a memory unit from the Xbox dashboard, and then copy it to your own console. Once on your Xbox hard disk, you can then race against it in Head to Head mode — how cool is that! Get a bunch of friends to all dump their Drivatars to your console and vice-versa and you can all continue to race against each other and learn each other’s lines and techniques without them being present (or on Xbox Live). In summary, you can specify races against:

• Your currently selected Drivatar (which will be mature by default)
• Any other mature Drivatars you may have created
• Any other mature Drivatars created by other players (i.e. under other profiles) on your Xbox
• Any mature Drivatars copied to your Xbox
• Any of Forza's built-in AI Drivatar competitors, at "easy", "medium" or "hard" level

Head to Head is also a great way of learning where you can improve your own driving, simply configure a field of your own Drivatars in a mix of similarly specified cars and you can race against multiple versions of yourself and see where you can improve your lines or braking points by battling head to head against yourself. Or, for the ultimate personalised racing challenge, try racing your own Drivatar while giving them the benefit of a slightly faster car.

Career Races

This is where your Drivatar gets to work for you and you can reap some financial reward and game progress for your efforts. At the beginning of each career race, a pre-race “start” menu is presented to you. There you’ll see the tantalisingly labelled “Load Drivatar” option. Once you have one or more locally-trained mature Drivatars available for that profile on your Xbox you can use this option to enter a Drivatar into the race for you. By “locally-trained” we mean that the Drivatar has to have been created and trained on the Xbox you are using at that time. What we didn’t want to see were people using Drivatars trained by other people to unlock tracks and cars for them — in other words cheating! So, in summary, to be able to enter a Drivatar in a career race, it must be:

• Mature
• Created on that physical Xbox
• Created and trained under the current profile

Once you’ve selected a valid Drivatar from the menu, you have hired your Drivatar to race for you in the selected career race. (you can subsequently "unload" your Drivatar if you change your mind). By default you will be presented with “Live TV” style coverage of the race once it starts. Remember, this isn’t a replay; this is now a “live” race with your Drivatar racing for you (and if you re-run the race, the outcome may be completely different). Watch your Drivatar battle with the opposition, observe where it is driving well or badly and learn from the experience. You can always use what you just learned to refresh your Drivatar's training at that race track and in the current car.

Once the race is complete, you’ll have to pay a proportion of any earnings to the Drivatar as its fee for risking life and limb for you but you’ll still earn some credits and reap the rewards of any unlocks or prize vehicles. You can look at how many credits your Drivatar has earned and other stats like how many races it has entered and won on the first tab in the Drivatar Statistics screen. We’ve tended to notice that Drivatars are pretty stingy with their earnings and tend not to spend them on anything other than pies, chips and mushy peas — though it has been rumoured that some trainers have managed to secure interest free loans for desirable wheels the Drivatar might want to drive for you.

Maturity

As noted earlier, when your Drivatar has completed all 5 lessons, he or she is considered to be "mature". The consequences of this are, in summary:

• Free Training is unlocked.
• Observe mode is expanded, in that you can now select from any track in the game, not just those tracks for which lessons have been completed.
• Head to Head is unlocked.

Copying Drivatars From Xbox to Xbox

Any Drivatar created on your Xbox we term to be "local". However, you can copy other "non-local" Drivatars to use in the game. Using the Xbox "dashboard" you can copy any Drivatar from the Xbox hard disk to a memory unit. From there, it can be copied to any other Xbox where it may be used subject to these limitations:

• A copied Drivatar may not be trained further. Drivatar Lessons and Free Training modes will be unavailable.
• A copied Drivatar may not be employed to enter a Career Race.

The main point of copying a Drivatar is hopefully obvious: it is to race against him or her in a custom Head to Head race. If you like, you can also Observe a copied Drivatar and examine its Statistics.

Learning From Your Drivatar

"When last we met, old man, you were the master and I was the pupil. Now I am the master."

Sounds a bit "tail wagging the dog" I know but if you want to get the most from your Drivatar then you need to watch and learn from your pupil.

One of the consistent themes in feedback email we received and our monitoring of Forza-related forums is that your Drivatars may well be great solo racers but they don't appear over-burdened with overtaking abilities. Well, that's a pretty fair assessment to be honest. Training is all done in a solo hot-lapping environment and yet the Drivatar is used in racing scenarios. Consequently, whilst the solo driving behaviour is personalised the overtaking behaviour is somewhat generic. "Somewhat" is the key word because you can tip the odds in your favour if you are prepared to enter the game...

Training and racing Drivatars can turn into a mini-game in itself if you let it. As the game was approaching completion and we were thrust into the happy position of having to do extensive testing I found that I got hooked on constantly upgrading — not just my cars but my Drivatars too. The Drivatar cycle went: train, race, win credits, upgrade car, race, re-train to take advantage of upgrades, win new car... etc etc etc. About three months before release I specifically remember getting my profile up to level 25 without ever driving a single race! My Drivatar was absolutely loaded with credits and my garage was filling up nicely with cars that it had won for me. During this cycle I found I was treating the Drivatar like an RPG character — constantly levelling up and improving its abilities. I then realised I was treating this part of the game as a game in itself. My initial motivation was dual pronged: to avoid replaying all those races I'd done tens of times before, and to test Drivatar functionality. In the end though I was doing it simply for fun!

Playing most games is all about learning to "beat" the designers, solving the puzzles they set and in particular exploiting your own strengths and the game's weaknesses. This is exactly what I was doing with Drivatars. I was watching my Drivatar race, observing its strengths and weaknesses and also the same attributes of the competition. Where I saw my Drivatar was weak, I'd go back to Free Training and I'd do some defensive lines. Where the AI of the opponents was weak, I'd go back and Free Train with some lines that exploited that weakness. The results?

Let's take an example. Turn one at Tsukuba. Now let's start this with a disclaimer: different races at this circuit, different classes, difficulty levels and lots more all contribute to how the AI drives so your mileage may vary. However, the basic principles apply. So, turn one at Tsukuba. My Drivatar was consistently "in the thick of it" at this turn on laps 2 and beyond. However, it kept trying to do a ridiculous outside overtake manoeuvre which not only always failed, it usually ended up losing a place instead of gaining one . My training at Tsukuba so far had been pretty consistent (have you any idea just HOW MANY TIMES I've driven a Focus SVT around Tsukuba during testing!?!) — approximately same lines, approximately same speeds. What I did was go to Free Training and deliberately do a lap and a half which stuck to that consistent line / speed for most of the circuit but deliberately cut closer to the right hand side of the start / finish straight, braking hard and as late as possible but giving me a very tight curb hugging line around turn one. It didn't do my Drivatar stats any favours, but I saved the training and then tried to race there again.

The first race my Drivatar did at this circuit after this updated training ran very similarly to previous races which was mildly disappointing but given that it was only a three lap race I tried again. On the third attempt it worked! My Drivatar was in 4th place close behind 3rd entering turn 9 (before the straight). It had a nice fast exit from turn 9 onto the straight and attempted to overtake on the right hand side. My car was pretty evenly matched for power with 3rd and the overtake wasn't going to succeed on power alone BUT after racing alongside each other for the length of the straight, my Drivatar went for that tight curb hugging line into turn one and forced 3rd place out on a wider line. Generally speaking, that wider line might have been faster but since we'd been battling all the way into the corner, 3rd place was more focussed on my Drivatar than on speed and consequently lost out. My Drivatar then took a nice swift exit from the corner and returned to what I considered my "usual" line having gained 3rd.

I've since used this and similar tricks regularly to make my Drivatar better at winning races. You can apply the same basic strategy in all sorts of places. Train some "blocking" lines into difficult corners like the chicane at Road Atlanta. Train some fast curb abusing lines like through the chicane at Alpine Ring. The list goes on. Of course when I refer to "my Drivatar" I've had lots of Drivatars and that particular guru has long gone but I'm still using the same techniques now that I'm playing the game as a gamer and not a developer. My Drivatar scores typically settle around 75%–80% but I'm not too concerned with them. They're a good indicator of how smoothly I drive and my corner speeds but they're not really an indication of how "good" my Drivatar is at winning races for me — and that's what I care about.

Once you embark upon this "optimisation" game it can become quite addictive. There's quite a hefty outlay in terms of initial training but once you've made the initial investment, the rewards are forthcoming and it’s a battle of wits, skill and tactics mixed with a healthy dose of luck which drives you onwards. The important aspect of the training is to keep it fresh. New car with substantially different handling? Update the training. Serious handling or power upgrades for existing car? Equally valid to update the training. Regular updating is important not just because of performance differences in the cars but also in you as a player — you'd be surprised how much you're improving all the time. I'm still shaving tenths off my times after many many hours of testing / playing.

My approach to Drivatar training now is to generally supply it 80–90% of the time with fast consistent solo racing laps. I then "top up" the training with some speculative "opponent aware" lines to give it more of an opportunity to pull off some spectacular overtakes and blocking manoeuvres — for one thing, it makes those Drivatar races all the more thrilling to watch! Talking of which, I'm sometimes quite disturbed by how much I enjoy watching those races! Finding yourself shouting at your Drivatar to "come on you ******* MUPPET - TAKE HIM" can lead you into a world of worry about your sanity...