TaxiDriver Reloaded 3.1.1 RC — Experimental AI Driver Tuning

3.1.1 RC ? Experimental AI Driver Tuning

This release candidate contains every change made after 3.1.0-beta.

Experimental AI notice: the AI driver remains a little clumsy and is provided mainly for fun. It is an experiment built around BeamNG's native vehicle AI, with an additional TaxiDriver supervisor that tries to make the built-in behavior more sensible in a visible passenger, delivery, and refueling scenario. It is not intended to behave like a production autonomous-driving system on every map, vehicle, junction, or traffic layout.

Driving presets and custom controls

• Added complete AI driving presets: Modest Novice, Cautious Driver, Balanced, Assertive, Mad Racer, and Custom.
• Ready-made presets atomically configure aggression, following gap, braking, stuck timeout, road-rule behavior, overtaking, clearance, recovery limits, and final-approach speed.
• Manual controls are now shown only for the Custom preset, matching the existing custom-difficulty interaction.
• Split the former traffic-rule switch into independent Obey speed limits and Obey traffic signals settings.
• Added a nested Maneuvers and recovery section for overtaking, lane-change clearance, oncoming-lane recovery, reverse recovery, maximum recovery attempts, and exact final-approach speed.
• Existing 3.1.0 Beta AI settings migrate to Custom and retain their values. New installations start with Balanced.
• Added complete preset and recovery text for all nine supported interface languages.

Reverse recovery and obstacle handling

• Added a rear-facing collision fan that evaluates several reverse steering angles against static geometry and nearby vehicles.
• A vehicle boxed against a wall, obstacle, or stopped car can now select the safest available rear corridor, reverse approximately 3?6 metres, stop, and replan its forward bypass.
• Rear clearance is rescanned throughout the maneuver; newly occupied space aborts the escape instead of blindly reversing into traffic.
• Added a configurable recovery-attempt limit. Once exhausted, AI stops and waits for player intervention instead of repeating aggressive recovery indefinitely.
• Lane-change clearance now scales the required free space both ahead and behind, while exact-approach speed controls the final physical trigger handoff.

Gearbox and stationary behavior

• Reworked the Arcade gearbox handoff to be idempotent: supported vehicles switch once instead of repeatedly changing behavior during the same session.
• Removed direct gear-index commands that could push manual transmissions back toward Realistic behavior or damage a reverse gear without clutch control.
• AI now leaves clutch and direction selection to BeamNG's Arcade controller.
• Stopped vehicles remain in Drive under the service brake and no longer cycle continuously between Drive and Neutral at signals or in slow queues.
• A short forward-pedal/parking-brake handoff recovers from Neutral or Reverse without rolling backward.
• Improved drive-readiness handling so the parking brake holds the vehicle while ignition, starter, and powertrain state settle.

Refueling behavior

• Removed automatic low-fuel and low-charge detours from AI mode.
• TaxiDriver no longer interrupts or redirects an accepted route solely because energy reaches a threshold.
• Refueling is now explicit: open Refuel, then enable AI on that fuel route if automatic driving is desired.
• Starting a fuel detour releases any currently active AI route so the player explicitly chooses whether to hand the new route back to AI.

Validation and compatibility

• Expanded Lua combinatorics for rear-fan planning, blocked reverse paths, Arcade idempotence, Drive holding, legacy-setting migration, all AI presets, independent road-rule combinations, clearance bounds, recovery limits, and final-approach speeds.
• Expanded functional UI checks for atomic preset application, Custom-only controls, the nested maneuver expander, and independent rule switches.
• Verified 301 responsive UI states across the in-game UI App, Connected Phone, all nine locales, compact/full layouts, and DPR 2 HiDPI rendering.
• The deterministic archive still contains 44 verified entries and rejects accidental automatic loading of TaxiDriver Vehicle Lua extensions.
• Existing settings and progress remain compatible; the release uses cache revision 311-rc so the in-game and external UIs do not mix assets with 3.1.0 Beta.

Full comparison: v3.1.0-beta...v3.1.1-rc