Chocobo Racing

[MiqobotKeymaster]

How Chocobo Racing Works

1. Teleport to Chocobo Square.
2. Get close to Chocobo Registrar NPC.
3. Select Class, Course, and Waypoints.
4. Press Start.

Miqobot will register to the race, wait for invitation to pop, and try to perform as best as she can.
With enough stats on your chocobo you can expect to be in the first places 🙂

Settings

1. Count – how many races to perform. A maximum amount of 99999 is supported (which equals to ~6 months of racing non-stop).
2. Class – tells Miqobot the first choice to make. Lower and Upper classes depend on your chocobo’s current rating. For example, at rating 45 you get R-60 as Lower class and R-80 as Upper class.
3. Course – tells Miqobot the second choice to make. All courses are supported, including Random. How it’s possible – please read below.

Waypoints

At the very basis, Chocobo Racing AI tracks the current progress of the race and chocobo’s stamina and tries to keep them aligned.
Miqobot can participate without any waypoints at all, but her performance will be far from perfect.

Waypoints contain information about steering and jumps. They help Miqobot to get all treasure chests and step on all bonus pads, while avoiding monsters and traps at the same time. Each preset may contain waypoints for all courses at once (Sagolii Road, Costa del Sol, and Tranquil Paths). When Miqobot enters the race, she selects the waypoints that were designed specifically for the chosen course. And when a preset contains all three of them, Random becomes available as well. This is possible due to a convenient storage design.

When you press Start button, Miqobot will check whether the selected preset contains the required waypoints. If there happens to be no waypoints, you still may choose to proceed. We recommend referring to Race Recording section if you want to know how to create a new preset. It’s rather easy to setup (much easier when compared to Navigation for Gathering).

The list of actions you can do with waypoints:

• Click: Select waypoints.
• Double-click: Rename waypoints.
• New: Create a new waypoints preset.
• Delete: Remove a selected waypoints preset.
• Save: Save everything to file on disk (including any changes to other presets).

Also, waypoints presets may be shared with your friends and the community. Please follow the guide on Sharing to know more.

Race Recording

This section provides an extension for 3D Radar, which lets you see the racing rails right inside your game.

1. Rails – enables drawing of left and right bounds of the course. Green color.
2. Mid-rail – enables drawing of the center of the course. Blue color.
3. Progress – enables drawing of the current progress, based on distance calculated by Miqobot. Orange color.
4. Waypoints – enables drawing of recorded waypoints for the current course. Jump positions are shown as triangles. Purple color.
   Tip: Waypoints checkbox will also enable a recording status box in the upper left corner of the game.

The course is selected automatically based on the current location.

Tip: You can see the rails not only during the race, but also if you teleport to that location in Eorzea where the race takes place.
If you want to see waypoints for Sagolii Road – go to Southern Thanalan.
If you want to see waypoints for Costa del Sol – go to Eastern La Noscea.
If you want to see waypoints for Tranquil Paths – go to South Shroud.

In order to record a new waypoints preset, create it first by pressing New button and rename it.
After that press Record button. A blue frame will appear inside your game meaning that Miqobot is ready to record.
Enter the race and control your chocobo manually. Miqobot will thoroughly remember everything you do. When the race is over, press Stop.

And that’s it.
Now Miqobot is ready to participate in this course. She will try her best by following your example 🙂

If you want to be able to participate in Random course, just go ahead and record waypoints for the other two courses using the same preset.

Abilities

This feature was added in Miqobot v1.2.4, and it allows you to specify at which point during the race Miqobot should use your race abilities.

Previously, both abilities would apply as soon as they become available, rendering some of them useless (such as Choco Cure). By specifying the amount of progress at which abilities should be executed, you can increase their effectiveness.
Valid values are in the range from 0% to 99%.

You may see from 1 to 3 icons on your racing hotbar, depending on how many active abilities your bird has.

1. Icon #1 always corresponds to a chest item. It is popped as soon as possible to prevent monsters and other racers from stealing it.
2. Icon #2 corresponds to your first ability, if it’s available.
3. Icon #3 corresponds to your second ability, if it’s available.

If Choco Aether is drawn from the chest and your ability gets restored, Miqobot will execute it again automatically.

Acceleration and Deceleration

This feature was added in Miqobot v1.2.4, giving you more precise control over how your stamina is spent during the race.

The game mechanics imply that your stamina has to be managed very carefully.
If you consume too much, your chocobo will burn out before the race is over and your speed will drastically decrease.
If you’re too thrifty with stamina, you may end up being the last place or even DNF.

The best performance is achieved when your stamina is spent evenly across the race. In order to do that, Miqobot tries to align the amount of stamina left with the amount of race left to go. In other words, she tries to stay as close as possible to this equation:

Progress + Stamina = 100%

If you have any extra stamina, the left part of the equation goes above 100%. This is the best moment to Accelerate.
If you run short of stamina, the left part of the equation falls down below 100%. At this point, it is recommended to Decelerate in order to remove the Lathered status, and keep running by inertia until the balance is restored.

What this means exactly:

• Acceleration = pressing W key.
• Deceleration = pressing S key.
• Running by inertia = nothing is pressed.

On the screenshot above, you can see the default recommended values:

• Accelerate, when above 99%.
• Run by inertia, when between 95% and 99%.
• Decelerate, when below 95%, and chocobo is still Lathered (in case you were affected by Frenzy).

Here we try to keep the equation just a little below 100% for Stamina Tablets and green pads.

Disabling decelerate only when Lathered option will allow Miqobot to ignore the Lathered status and Decelerate indefinitely (until Acceleration rule takes effect again).

A few more examples:

• When your chocobo is at 36% Progress with 60% Stamina, the equation is:
  36% + 60% = 96%
  96% is between 95% and 99%, so Miqobot will default to running by inertia. No acceleration and no deceleration here.

• If you run over a green pad immediately after this (+1% Progress, +7% Stamina), the equation becomes:
  37% + 67% = 104%
  104% is above 99%, so Miqobot accelerates.

• If you have Choco Cure II or Choco Cure III, you might want to make Miqobot accelerate always.
  This is achieved by setting 0% into both input fields.

• If you have Breather ability (added in patch 3.25), it might be better to switch between accelerating and decelerating constantly, and ignore inertia completely.
  This is achieved by setting 99% into both input fields, and unchecking the ‘only when Lathered’ option.

We encourage you to experiment in order to find the best match of these settings to your personal chocobo build.

Advanced Acceleration and Deceleration

There are special input values, which allow altering the default equations used by Miqobot.

1. Specifying a ‘p’ character in front will drop Stamina from the equation above.
2. Specifying a ‘s’ character in front will drop Progress from the equation above.

For example:

• ‘p90’ for Acceleration means

  Accelerate if Progress > 90%

• ‘s40’ for Deceleration means

  Decelerate if Stamina < 40%

These settings were used mainly for development, but we decided to leave them in the end.
They may be used in combination with some exotic abilities (such as Super Sprint).

Steer Power

This is the advanced option, which lets you adjust the underlying steering math used by Miqobot.

Under normal circumstances, you don’t have to worry about this setting.
But in some rare cases, depending on your FPS and network latency, you may observe unwanted behaviour, such as walking in snake lines. This option lets you mitigate the damage done by lags and high latency.

By default, this option is invisible. To turn it on, it is required to edit settings.miqo manually using any text editor. The setting is called:

• advanced.steervisible – makes Steer Power visible on UI.

Tip: Close Miqobot Before editing settings.miqo, because otherwise she will overwrite your changes with whatever was stored in the memory.

The default value of the setting is 1.0. Try increasing or decreasing it until you achieve the behaviour you desire.

• Values like 1.25 and above make Miqobot think that steering is overpowered (a very fast network connection). This results in shorter keystrokes.
• Values like 0.75 and below make Miqobot think that steering is underpowered (a very slow network connection, or low FPS). This results in longer keystrokes.

By saying shorter and longer keystrokes we imply small fractions of a second (about 0.1 sec).

Please note, that movement in Chocobo Racing is handled by the server, not by the game client. That’s why it feels like chocobo controls are somewhat laggy. There is no cheat or any other way around this.

This setting won’t prevent you from having lag spikes, but it may help you get better racing results under unstable network connection.

Video

Check out this in action:

MGP Features in Development

Chocobo Racing is not the only possible option to farm MGP.
At the moment, There’s a Triple Triad AI planned and Minigames on Minion Square.

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[MiqobotKeymaster]

New features have been added for Chocobo Racing in Miqobot v1.2.4.
The guide is updated with new sections.

[MiqobotKeymaster]

Examples are added to Acceleration and Deceleration section.

[Author]

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