Sex Appeal for vehicles

[pdescobar]

I recently searched the editing and SA forums several times trying to find out what controls vehicle sex appeal and the answer invariably said something vague about the monetary value listed in handling.cfg. However, this wasn't satisfactory to me because there were clear exceptions to this such as the cheap Caddy having double the sex appeal of cars two and three times its "value."

 

So, this weekend I undertook a sex appeal survey of every vehicle I could enter in the (unmodified) game and I now believe that the handling.cfg monetary value is completely meaningless to sex appeal. Instead, the sex appeal stat seems to derive entirely from the vehicle "class" as defined in vehicles.ide.

 

To perform the experiment, I loaded up a game where I had gotten through the "A Home in the Hills" mission but had done absolutely nothing outside the storyline. I then stripped my CJ bare (aside from the valet uniform) with a poor haircut; the result was an innate sex appeal of something less than 5%. I then went through and entered and exited every vehicle I could find (spraying first if it got damaged during the procurement process) and noted the change to his sex appeal stat. I was able to test all but about 6 vehicles this way; for the others I had to go to other saved games and note a similar change with a much studlier base CJ.

 

The results of the experiment showed a 100% correlation between in-game sex appeal and the vehicles.ide "class" setting. Specifically, there were 4 general sex appeal values and each of the 13 different classes could be linked to one of these four general values with every single vehicle tested confirming this linkage. What follows is a list of these values and specific vehicle examples (along with their monetary values.)

• High sex appeal (approx 50-60% boost)
  • executive class. Ex: Bullet (105k), Buffalo (35k), BF Injection (15k)
  • richfamily class. Ex: ZR-350 (45k), Premier (25k), Caddy (9k)
  • leisureboat class. Ex: Tropic (73k), Speeder (30k)
• Average sex appeal (approx 25-30% boost)
  • normal class. Ex: Rancher (40k), Picador (26k), Baggage (9k)
  • motorbike class. Ex: NRG-500 (10k), BF-400 (10k), Wayfarer (10k)
  • ignore class. Ex: Rhino (110k), Dozer (5k), Squalo (60k), Coastguard (10k), Hunter (99k), Skimmer (10k)
• Low sex appeal (approx 10-15% boost)
  • taxi class. Ex: Taxi (20k), Cabbie (10k)
  • worker class. Ex: Roadtrain (35k), Dumper (5k)
  • workerboat class. Ex: Marquis (99k), Dinghy (5k)
• Minimal sex appeal (approx 5% boost)
  • poorfamily class. Ex: Nebula (35k), Greenwood (19k), Bravura (9k)
  • moped class. Ex: Faggio (10k)
  • bicycle class. Ex: BMX (10k)
  • big class. Ex: Securicar (40k), S.W.A.T. (40k)

I am now 99% sure that it is this class description which completely defines the vehicle sex appeal, although I would appreciate it if someone could run a simple test where they take a common car like the greenwood and note any sex appeal changes with varying classes and then run a second test with a constant class and varying monetary values. I cannot run such a test myself because I have the xbox version of the game and I'm keeping the xbox warranty intact.

 

I have no GTA modding experience, but I assume that this class definition does more than define sex appeal. As an aside, could anyone with more experience explain what the other effects of changing a vehicle's "class" would be?

 

And a final question arises as well. Assuming my hypothesis is correct, where are the sex appeal values for each class defined and can they be changed?

 

[The Fawker]

Great find man thanx for all your research

[Augh]

Ooooh... f*ck. Why didn't I think of that. I was wondering about this the other day. nice job man. As a really sh*tty explanation/semi-guess, the class at least USED (VC) to seem to dictate what areas the car would be likely to show up, and at what time of day, and I believe you would be more likely to encounter cars in the same class as one you're driving/just got out of. Like if you drive a Sabre you'll see more Sabres, but also cars of the same class. Or that's just totally wrong and misinformation >_<

 

But if I post it, someone might refute it, then we know for sure from someone who knows wtf they're talking about. Hah

 

Cheers for the infos, that explains a thing or two

[BenMillard]

Ah, so I'm not the only one who does lengthy experiments about trivial features of GTA!

 

The way the vehicle classes and pedestrian classes interact in GTASA is a lot more complicated than previous editions. In popcycle.dat you can see how zones defined in the map each have a table to set how frequently different classes of people (there POPulation) spawn at certain times of day in each zone. The pedestrian classes are linked to cars via the cargrp.dat file.

 

The pedestrians are originally defined in peds.ide and vehicles are originally defined in vehicles.ide since these are the Item DEfinition files.

 

I'm not quite sure how the Class column interacts with all this. The only effect it has in GTASA might be the "Sexyness" feature but I can't be sure.

Edited September 13, 2005 by Cerbera