The illusion of a living breathing city

[Ekre]

/facepalm

[eagle016]

You realize you wrote over 2000 words about something that everybody either A) Doesn't care about or B) Already knew or C) Both?

[bidji]

that's the beauty of it.

[villin]

Dude just play Fallout 3.

 

In that game you can nuke an entire town and it will be destroyed no matter how many times you turn around.

[Creed Bratton]

WOW, you are a complete idiot. You just wrote a long f*ckin' page about something we've known for years, since the dawn of free roaming games.

[proh1]

[PestilenceJM]

First off: ive read your full thread (+update).

 

@ Everything above the "UPDATE": What happens on the computer screen is ALLWAYS illusions, smoke and mirrors. Also called "virtual". Video games are therefor called "Virtual Reality". They are more or less calculated, depending on the kind of use it has and how good a PC you need for it.

 

 

Also, why is there no system of caching interactions with peds/cops/cars and having them being saved to a cache file on the HDD when they leave our "bubble" and dematerialized and bring back those attributes and changes and our history of interactions the next time we meet inside the "bubble" are they are "rematerialized"? EXAMPLE: Say we get into a fight with a cop and hurt or injury him badly and cripple his leg and damage his car... Say we RUN away fast and he is outside our bubble, so the game still "erases" him from rendering and from system ram/memory as before, but this time just before recycling him the game saves a cache of his attributes/changed attributes to a file on the hard drive, so the NEXT time we bump into him again and he reenters our Bubble/zone/radius he is rematerialized with the same attributes as we last saw him with the crumbled car and damaged knee etc!!!

 

Well, you cant just save the exact scene when you leave it. Cause when some cop gets hurt, and you leave the scene, then STILL there should happen things. Ambulance comes, other cops back him up, they ask out the witnesses etc. This all has to be calculated, and it reaches from the actual scene, up to the police station, the hospital and those emergency cars might cause other traffic accidents or jams and all.

 

Scenes cant just "FREEZE" when you leave them, and when you come back they look exactly the same as 30 minutes before. Thats unrealistic. Its better if its just "recycled".

 

In the future, with future CPUs, there might be certain major activities going on in open world games wich are interactive and continueous while the player is absent. But nowadays, no hardware could manage to calculate all that along with the things wich are going on at the players location.

 

 

Another example, say we are stalking a hot chick and we stalk her for "hours" but we are not careful and get hit by a car. By the time we get up she may have gotten around across the corner and then the game "got rid of her" and "she" is gone forever! When the game erases people to save memory why can they not incorporate a something like a 5minute system where it caches to harddrive and remembers all the NPCs that it erased during the last five minute period (their health level, location, direction and heading, etc) and whenever we SHOULD cross paths again (say I turn the corner and expect to see her again) she is rematerialized just before I turn the corner???

 

This is even worse. Do you want the system to remember EACH pedestrian you meet for minutes? Imagine you drive through a well crowded city part for 5 minutes. You will probably meet like 500 pedestrians. You want 500 pedestrians to be "remembered" by your system at the same time with all their attributes? Good luck, im sure your system will crash. Same as above: not possible yet.

 

 

 

Basically and what I am saying is that our interactions and changes in the game do not "stick" and are forgotten and erased and recycled VERY soon after.. What is the point of a sandbox environment if the sand doesn't keep its shape and doesn't remember our changes? What if every time you built a sand castle and it disappears the moment you look away from it? In the END how does GTAIV differ CATEGORICALLY from any other game? How is it in any way a living breathing city when the interactions are not even saved and nothing you do matters one way or another outside of your 100ft bubble and 30 second memory span of the game?

 

You are forgetting about the friends, girlfriends and other contacts in the game. They are all still where they are supposed to be. And if you want to do something with them, then you can do it. But 99,9% of Liberty Citys habitants are just not a matter for you in this game. Even tho its a big sandbox game, it still has a storyLINE. And even now and then you have choices to do. They arent affecting much, but thats because there cant be endless possebilities. Just think of all the audio they need to record for the story.

 

 

 

Conclusion: Implementation of a system like I mentioned above will not take significantly more cpu cycles or ram usage and will only result in a margin performance hit but increase the "alive immersing factor" by orders of magnitude... NPCs, Cars and other objects are still being recycled and erased from Ram and CPU once they leave our boundary, but the different is the changes (like a dented car, or a hurt ped) are saved and cached to a file in the hdd and reinstatnitated the moment we came back into contact with said NPC/Car/Cop and the changes and attributes are reapplied to the generic NPC being spawned to make them "who they were when we last saw them"

 

Yeah, but this only saves the current condition of a NPC, car or object. So there will be tons of information like "Objectname, pos xyz, hp, ...etc". And while they are saved and not further calculated, they WONT change. So whatever car you just hit to the side of the road and the person inside is injures, youll meet this person in exact the same position and condition when you come back 30 minutes later. And another 30 minutes later, youll probably meet another 20 cars wich you pushed off the road sometime back in history.

When nothing is going on while the player is absent but still everything is saved, then you will have a file full of those infofiles for cars, peds, objects. The city will be totally f*cked up within an hour.

 

In GTA every player drives like a f*ck, crossing red lights, crashing other cars, killing people.... imagine all this to STAY and become permanent. You will have a city full of dead bodies, crashed cars, and all emergency personnel totally overchallenged.

 

 

I am sure that there will be a better working simulation of a city in a 3d world one day. But the ideas on HOW to do it and the technology will take some time to evolve correct.

 

 

May i ask what you actually want to reach with this thread?

[cR]

There are and I repeat there are no "hundreds and hundreds" of cars in LC and no "thousands of civilians and pedestrians" on the streets of Liberty City.

You crack me up. Did you really believe the current avaible hardware would be able to deliver something like that in a game? I don't even think a 'super computer' like IBM's Roadrunner would be able to do it.

[GTAMonkey2012]

 

In fact there is NOTHING at all in Liberty City EXCEPT a radius that surrounds YOU the PLAYER and inside this limited and restricted "bubble" that follows you wherever you go there are cars and peds that "materialize" and Pop-in just outside of the boundary of this radius

 

>> <<

 

Seems to me your the only one in the illusion while everyone else enjoys the series already knowing this, the day this was the opposite will be in about 4 years on multi qauds & SLI. Why on earth as a programmer would you spawn items the "player" (the actual point of the games existence) in places you will never realise or see or actually give a sh*t about, in order to make it crawl on its knees so no one can even enjoy the "radius".

 

Brilliant thread.

 

Smoke and mirrors = all games and anything inside binary & held within silicon.

Edited December 18, 2008 by GTAMonkey2012

[johnlee]

 

There are and I repeat there are no "hundreds and hundreds" of cars in LC and no "thousands of civilians and pedestrians" on the streets of Liberty City.

You crack me up. Did you really believe the current avaible hardware would be able to deliver something like that in a game? I don't even think a 'super computer' like IBM's Roadrunner would be able to do it.

Do you remember the reviews and all the hyped up reviewers back in April that said this was living breathing city with and I QUOTE "thousands of artificially intelligence citizens" at the SAME time...

I am not putting words in anyones mouth....

[GTAMonkey2012]

I think you need to read up on marketing and corporations, spin, hype and other techniques .. don't be shocked, the REAL world is far worse. Even reading that sh*t I laughed when it came out, didn't make me complain when i realised .. "oh yeh that's not strictly true and it runs like every other GTA in terms of spawning" I want a refund!

Edited December 18, 2008 by GTAMonkey2012

[johnlee]

First off: ive read your full thread (+update).

 

@ Everything above the "UPDATE": What happens on the computer screen is ALLWAYS illusions, smoke and mirrors. Also called "virtual". Video games are therefor called "Virtual Reality". They are more or less calculated, depending on the kind of use it has and how good a PC you need for it.

 

 

Also, why is there no system of caching interactions with peds/cops/cars and having them being saved to a cache file on the HDD when they leave our "bubble" and dematerialized and bring back those attributes and changes and our history of interactions the next time we meet inside the "bubble" are they are "rematerialized"? EXAMPLE: Say we get into a fight with a cop and hurt or injury him badly and cripple his leg and damage his car... Say we RUN away fast and he is outside our bubble, so the game still "erases" him from rendering and from system ram/memory as before, but this time just before recycling him the game saves a cache of his attributes/changed attributes to a file on the hard drive, so the NEXT time we bump into him again and he reenters our Bubble/zone/radius he is rematerialized with the same attributes as we last saw him with the crumbled car and damaged knee etc!!!

 

Well, you cant just save the exact scene when you leave it. Cause when some cop gets hurt, and you leave the scene, then STILL there should happen things. Ambulance comes, other cops back him up, they ask out the witnesses etc. This all has to be calculated, and it reaches from the actual scene, up to the police station, the hospital and those emergency cars might cause other traffic accidents or jams and all.

 

Scenes cant just "FREEZE" when you leave them, and when you come back they look exactly the same as 30 minutes before. Thats unrealistic. Its better if its just "recycled".

 

In the future, with future CPUs, there might be certain major activities going on in open world games wich are interactive and continueous while the player is absent. But nowadays, no hardware could manage to calculate all that along with the things wich are going on at the players location.

 

 

Another example, say we are stalking a hot chick and we stalk her for "hours" but we are not careful and get hit by a car. By the time we get up she may have gotten around across the corner and then the game "got rid of her" and "she" is gone forever! When the game erases people to save memory why can they not incorporate a something like a 5minute system where it caches to harddrive and remembers all the NPCs that it erased during the last five minute period (their health level, location, direction and heading, etc) and whenever we SHOULD cross paths again (say I turn the corner and expect to see her again) she is rematerialized just before I turn the corner???

 

This is even worse. Do you want the system to remember EACH pedestrian you meet for minutes? Imagine you drive through a well crowded city part for 5 minutes. You will probably meet like 500 pedestrians. You want 500 pedestrians to be "remembered" by your system at the same time with all their attributes? Good luck, im sure your system will crash. Same as above: not possible yet.

 

 

 

Basically and what I am saying is that our interactions and changes in the game do not "stick" and are forgotten and erased and recycled VERY soon after.. What is the point of a sandbox environment if the sand doesn't keep its shape and doesn't remember our changes? What if every time you built a sand castle and it disappears the moment you look away from it? In the END how does GTAIV differ CATEGORICALLY from any other game? How is it in any way a living breathing city when the interactions are not even saved and nothing you do matters one way or another outside of your 100ft bubble and 30 second memory span of the game?

 

You are forgetting about the friends, girlfriends and other contacts in the game. They are all still where they are supposed to be. And if you want to do something with them, then you can do it. But 99,9% of Liberty Citys habitants are just not a matter for you in this game. Even tho its a big sandbox game, it still has a storyLINE. And even now and then you have choices to do. They arent affecting much, but thats because there cant be endless possebilities. Just think of all the audio they need to record for the story.

 

 

 

Conclusion: Implementation of a system like I mentioned above will not take significantly more cpu cycles or ram usage and will only result in a margin performance hit but increase the "alive immersing factor" by orders of magnitude... NPCs, Cars and other objects are still being recycled and erased from Ram and CPU once they leave our boundary, but the different is the changes (like a dented car, or a hurt ped) are saved and cached to a file in the hdd and reinstatnitated the moment we came back into contact with said NPC/Car/Cop and the changes and attributes are reapplied to the generic NPC being spawned to make them "who they were when we last saw them"

 

Yeah, but this only saves the current condition of a NPC, car or object. So there will be tons of information like "Objectname, pos xyz, hp, ...etc". And while they are saved and not further calculated, they WONT change. So whatever car you just hit to the side of the road and the person inside is injures, youll meet this person in exact the same position and condition when you come back 30 minutes later. And another 30 minutes later, youll probably meet another 20 cars wich you pushed off the road sometime back in history.

When nothing is going on while the player is absent but still everything is saved, then you will have a file full of those infofiles for cars, peds, objects. The city will be totally f*cked up within an hour.

 

In GTA every player drives like a f*ck, crossing red lights, crashing other cars, killing people.... imagine all this to STAY and become permanent. You will have a city full of dead bodies, crashed cars, and all emergency personnel totally overchallenged.

 

 

I am sure that there will be a better working simulation of a city in a 3d world one day. But the ideas on HOW to do it and the technology will take some time to evolve correct.

 

May i ask what you actually want to reach with this thread?

May i ask what you actually want to reach with this thread?

 

 

 

This thread and threads of this nature prove the "point"

http://www.gtaforums.com/index.php?showtop...entry1058781979

[cR]

There are and I repeat there are no "hundreds and hundreds" of cars in LC and no "thousands of civilians and pedestrians" on the streets of Liberty City.

You crack me up. Did you really believe the current avaible hardware would be able to deliver something like that in a game? I don't even think a 'super computer' like IBM's Roadrunner would be able to do it.

Do you remember the reviews and all the hyped up reviewers back in April that said this was living breathing city with and I QUOTE "thousands of artificially intelligence citizens" at the SAME time...

I am not putting words in anyones mouth....

They probably didn't mean that literally.

 

I agree cops should keep looking around in the area they lost you tho.

 

And also, I absolutly HATE loosing my car(s) by going outside the 'bubble'. I want a nice car and keep it for as long as possible and do a pay 'n spray whenever it gets damaged and wash it when it's dirty. Now I allways loose my cars, mostly during missions.

[PunchyPappy]

May i ask what you actually want to reach with this thread?

A higher dimension?

 

Seriously JohnLee: When you come down from whatever you are smoking plz don´t forget to drop in and let us know what you REALLY think/feel about this game

 

It sure was a good read though ... made me laugh on more than one occasion.

[hitmanjaret]

Wow, a lot of you that replied in this thread didn't even read his entire post, he clearly stated many times he doesn't want EVERYTHING to be RENDERED all the TIME. I understand a lot of us already knew about the "bubble" thing, however, he was trying to make a valid point about a system that could hold important information in a game and make it more realistic and possibly add to the gameplay in a positive way.

 

I agree with him... I think atleast something could be coded to store non-rendered information at a radius of double the render "bubble" or more. Then you could go around corners and find the same peds/cars/whatever that you saw go around that corner. That is the most basic level of improvement I think should be implemented.

 

Then to go a step further, as he stated, there could be events and sequences that are calculated and stored yet not rendered until the player actually reaches a certain location or area in which the information needs to be rendered. This could take up to much RAM or other resources and make it impossible.

Edited December 19, 2008 by hitmanjaret

[MonkeyMhz]

Obviously If they had the peds doing AI calculations across the map that you dont even see, the lag would be unbearable. If you never knew that almost all free roaming games do this you have something seriously wrong. Games are Illusions, everything is a trick, rain? no its not emmited everywhere in most games its a cylinder around you with a alpha mapped image of falling rain. What about bullet holes, no they arent making holes its simply a decal image placed. Games are tricks, thats how they work, If you can trick a way to do something and save a couple polys its done. Because GTAIV would be a complete 1fps slideshow on a GTX280 if they made everything happen around the whole map all at once.

 

However I understand your ideas, that would make the game more realistic but would be alot more work for R*, they barely could make GTAIV on the PC right yet alone add all that stuff. They probably have short time limits and a budget and thats whats holding them back. And also it would be too much work for the Xbox/PS3 to do what your talking about, or it would slow it alot down for consoles. And this game was based on console. So too bad, but i agree with you.

Edited December 19, 2008 by MonkeyMhz

[TheHitm4N]

johnlee has a valid point. If a cop loses you, he disappears only to be replaced by new cops which spawn out of nearby places inside your 'bubble radius'.

 

However, if you lose a cop, they are outside your 'bubble radius', therefore they dont exist anymore. If they did exist and carried on trying to find you, the 'bubble radius' would increase in size since the cop still exists in the game. Eventually thick black smoke would start pouring out of my tower case and my computer would start to melt-down...

 

In other words, whilst you have a valid point, it is not possible with today's computers. What you are talking about is way too stressful even for the best computers out there... Besides, it is demanding enough already.

 

Also, there is no need of having LC completely full with millions of peds and cops that dont disappear when you'll only be interacting with 0.01% of them at a time..

Edited December 19, 2008 by TheHitm4N

[NeonIrish]

 

Instead of a game like PMDG where all you do is fly realistic airliner simulations

 

Excuse me!

 

PMDG is NOT a game it's an add-on FOR a game which is Microsoft Flight Simulator.

 

When you fly online on VATSIM you join a MMO which IS living and breathing with online players who are flying and providing Air traffic control services around all parts of the World

[Vicetopia]

How dare you insult the mighty flight simulator!

[GTA3Freak-2001]

I think you miss the point that video games are a product of entertainment made to make money, if it was easy to make the game like you say then I am sure they would spend the time to work it out. They have deadlines and budgets to stick to so that the end result makes a profit for the company.

[PestilenceJM]

There are and I repeat there are no "hundreds and hundreds" of cars in LC and no "thousands of civilians and pedestrians" on the streets of Liberty City.

You crack me up. Did you really believe the current avaible hardware would be able to deliver something like that in a game? I don't even think a 'super computer' like IBM's Roadrunner would be able to do it.

Do you remember the reviews and all the hyped up reviewers back in April that said this was living breathing city with and I QUOTE "thousands of artificially intelligence citizens" at the SAME time...

I am not putting words in anyones mouth....

They probably didn't mean that literally.

 

I agree cops should keep looking around in the area they lost you tho.

 

And also, I absolutly HATE loosing my car(s) by going outside the 'bubble'. I want a nice car and keep it for as long as possible and do a pay 'n spray whenever it gets damaged and wash it when it's dirty. Now I allways loose my cars, mostly during missions.

They also say that you can drive cars and use guns. But if you buy the game, are there any carkeys in the box, or a gun?

NO! Cause its a videogame and those are virtual

[JBFord4x4]

There are 1000s of individual civilians. No 2 pedestrians are alike in IV.

[shivanandrs]

In fact there is NOTHING at all in Liberty City EXCEPT a radius that surrounds YOU the PLAYER and inside this limited and restricted "bubble" that follows you wherever you go there are cars and peds that "materialize" and Pop-in just outside of the boundary of this radius ... WHen they drive outside of this invisible boundary or when you relocate to a different area of the city and effectively remove them from your "bubble" they are recycled and removed from the game as well... There are NO CARS, NO PEDS, NO NOTHING outside of this bubble radius and in fact at ANY GIVEN MOMENT Liberty City is 99.99% EMPTYNESS!!!

 

When you kill a old lady there are no cops that get into cop cars and drive from their police stations to chase after you.. What happens is a "cop car" spawns right outside of the preset radius (probably like 300ft or something) and then drives towards you... IDEALLY the copcar spawns when you are not looking (camera view) at him so as to maintain the ILLUSION... or he spawns just beyond your line of sight across from the closest building etc... and then the copcar DRIVES towards you and then when the copcar gets to within 50ft of you "IT" spawns the actual flesh and bones COP-person within the car that is supposed to be driving the car.....

 

Lets say you drive REALLY fast and lose the cops. Once you LOSE him he is GONE for good. That cop/copcar INSTANCE is erased from the game and never to be seen again. Once he is outside of your bubble zone he disappears and vanishes and quickly as he came into existence...

 

The point is people in LC don't live their lives and blah blah blah... THEY DON"T EXIST! They have no separate existence apart of being a prop and playing the part and being called in and acting like they are real on a LOCAL level only to the extend of providing cars and people and creating the illusion of an "interactive, immersive, real and living breathing city"....

 

When in fact it is a dead, lonely, empty, pointless and event less city and only 0.01% of the whole map has any action at any point in time... and even THAT is done on-the-fly and changes are not maintained...

 

 

=============UPDATE BELOW=======================================================

 

Okay people I realize it is impossible and quite pointless to have those thousands of peds and cars in the city being rendered and all in real time.. But we should AT LEAST have probability density matrix and a functional (not atomic) representation of calculating the most likely events (accidents, murders, fights) that would happen THROUGHOUT the city WITHOUT the engine having to render it, and without the game actually dedicating resources to spawning these characters. Currently there is NO such thing, the whole city (absent our own BUBBLE) is EMPTY with not even a prediction/probability calculation of what all should be happening in different parts and regions while we are not physically present.

 

Also, why is there no system of caching interactions with peds/cops/cars and having them being saved to a cache file on the HDD when they leave our "bubble" and dematerialized and bring back those attributes and changes and our history of interactions the next time we meet inside the "bubble" are they are "rematerialized"? EXAMPLE: Say we get into a fight with a cop and hurt or injury him badly and cripple his leg and damage his car... Say we RUN away fast and he is outside our bubble, so the game still "erases" him from rendering and from system ram/memory as before, but this time just before recycling him the game saves a cache of his attributes/changed attributes to a file on the hard drive, so the NEXT time we bump into him again and he reenters our Bubble/zone/radius he is rematerialized with the same attributes as we last saw him with the crumbled car and damaged knee etc!!!

 

Another example, say we are stalking a hot chick and we stalk her for "hours" but we are not careful and get hit by a car. By the time we get up she may have gotten around across the corner and then the game "got rid of her" and "she" is gone forever! When the game erases people to save memory why can they not incorporate a something like a 5minute system where it caches to harddrive and remembers all the NPCs that it erased during the last five minute period (their health level, location, direction and heading, etc) and whenever we SHOULD cross paths again (say I turn the corner and expect to see her again) she is rematerialized just before I turn the corner???

 

Basically and what I am saying is that our interactions and changes in the game do not "stick" and are forgotten and erased and recycled VERY soon after.. What is the point of a sandbox environment if the sand doesn't keep its shape and doesn't remember our changes? What if every time you built a sand castle and it disappears the moment you look away from it? In the END how does GTAIV differ CATEGORICALLY from any other game? How is it in any way a living breathing city when the interactions are not even saved and nothing you do matters one way or another outside of your 100ft bubble and 30 second memory span of the game?

 

And I repeat : Why is there no system of caching interactions with peds/cops/cars and having them being saved to a cache file on the HDD when they leave our "bubble" and dematerialized and bring back those attributes and changes and our history of interactions the next time we meet inside the "bubble" are they are "rematerialized"? This would solve two things:

 

1. It would emulate a "real city" from a functional (instead of atomic) level and increase the REALISM because it is simulating a embodied city reather than a simple smokes and mirrors sytem

 

2. Since cars, peds, actions are still taken offscreen and recycled once they exit our personal bubble and only the changed attributes are "remembered" and cached to a file on the harddrive to be "reapplied" the next time these generic NPC's are spawned according to when the system calculates/predicts we SHOULD meet again, then this totally resolved the memory and cpu cycle issue of rendering, spawning and doing atomic calculations on each of the things in the city...

 

Conclusion: Implementation of a system like I mentioned above will not take significantly more cpu cycles or ram usage and will only result in a margin performance hit but increase the "alive immersing factor" by orders of magnitude... NPCs, Cars and other objects are still being recycled and erased from Ram and CPU once they leave our boundary, but the different is the changes (like a dented car, or a hurt ped) are saved and cached to a file in the hdd and reinstatnitated the moment we came back into contact with said NPC/Car/Cop and the changes and attributes are reapplied to the generic NPC being spawned to make them "who they were when we last saw them"

 

This method is STILL an emulating system, but a much better one that increases the REALISM by orders of magnitude while only taking a very marginal performance hit on modern systems.

 

 

As a one last example: right now when we shoot someone and the cops come it is very unrealistic ... They materialized just around the corner....

 

Now I am NOTTTT suggesting we actually render the cop at the cop station, render him putting on a uniform miles away and driving from the station all the way to our location, BUTTTT we could represent and simulate this from a FUNCTIONAL (rather than atomic) level and increase the realism, embodiemnt, and immserive factor by orders of magnitude!

 

How? We need not render or spawn the cop or car from the station and waste cpu/ram at all! The game intelligently calculates how long it SHOULD take the cop to arrive based on the time of day, the distance from the station, the current traffic levels, weather (if it is rainy or foggy he will be "predicted" to go slower) etc and the cops shows up in a REALISTIC time frame and all this is calculated from precached probability lookup tables without ahving to waste ram or cpu cycles by actually rendering him or spawning his character and car objects into Ram. SO again the cop will still materialed in much the same way outside the bubble compared to how it is done right now, but because of behind the scenes calculations of predicting /estimating how long it SHOULD take we give him a realistic time or arrival that is calculated on the fly based on current player location, level of crime as reported by peds calling it in, the traffic, the weather system, etc.... This could EASILY by done and will not tax the system but increase realism by a ton!

 

something like COP_ArrivalTime = LevelofStars * (PlayerDistanceFromClosestsCopStation + TrafficCongestionCoefficent + BadWeatherCoefficent - NumberofPedsReportingIncident)

 

instead of right now where it is the equalivent of COP_ArrivalTime = as soon as you can spawn one

 

 

 

 

======My last update to this post========================================

 

 

I am getting tired of people making excuses for R* saying it is all for our benefit of future proof... I have the following remarks to make about "future proof"

 

why I recently discovered that the PC version of GTAIV has a built in 20ft cap on rendering peds and drivers in CARS??? Even on the most power system today with all settings maxed out in the PC version of GTAIV peds and drivers in cars don't appear until you are as close as 20 feet away from them!!!! And there seems to be no way around this!!!

 

http://www.gtaforums.com/index.php?showtopic=385426

 

 

SEE VIDEO EXAMPLE HERE: -> http://blip.tv/file/1591319

 

============

 

So let me get this right, the PC version is permanently HANDICAPPED (see : http://www.gtaforums.com/index.php?showtopic=385426) for NO REASON AT ALL!!! and it has worse graphics at worse framerates YET needs exponentially more RAM, is more than twice as large in size as the 360 version, more harddrive space, more CPU and GPU cycles and they said they have made it future proof??? How is it future proof? The way I see it the 20ft ped-in-car-cap will still exists in 2088, except by then the activations servers for Live and Rockstar Social Club would have went offline and there would be no more support from R*, MS, or Sony the Securom makers so what is a quantum computer to do???

 

How is it "future proof" when it has already been proven by millions of gamers that the same GTAIV game runs perfectly well on a vastly inferior system with better graphics and better framerates than the top of the line pcs can do today??? This game is over 6 months old, it is already "aged" in the gaming world, it played just fine on a console system that was realized back in 2005 and they do a half ass sloppy port to PC and put a crap load of DRM and rootkits on the game and slap it with a hefty price tag plus ridiculous going through hoops and it runs slower and looks suckier even on state of the art PC that is 100X more powerful than xbox and they have the audacity to call these optimizations "future proof"

 

Maybe in the future all our games will render peds in cars at 2ft radius at the rate this is going???? A game that was released well over half a year ago that has already been proven by millions to run perfectly well on a far inferior console system released way back in 2005 now comes out on the pc and runs slower, with poorer graphics even on the most state of the art computer systems that overpower any next-gen console by orders of magnitude now needs more ram, more cpu, more gpu and more hdd on even so renders slower and poorer than ever before! This is progress???? This is future proof???? Maybe if I code a FPS that looks like crap with graphics worse than the original Rainbow Six by Tom Clancy and is so horribly unoptimized and ridden with bugs and crap that it runs 1fps on a hypothetically NSA quantum computer I could sell it for $500 million bucks because it is FUTURE PROOF????

Man it is what it is, and it still is a damn good game. Hopefully sometime in the not so far future R* would be able to create a true living breathing city.

[jelly]

You know, I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.

[Svip]

You know, I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.

Exactly, GTA IV is way behind, The Matrix is so much better in terms of realism. Go play that. It's easy, you're already plugged in.

[PacMaan]

There was an early GTASA multiplayer mod that i remember where vehicles you spawned remained on the map nomatter how far outside the "bubble" you went. One time we were messing about spawning loads of packers in the stormdrain, left the game and went back on 48 hours later and they were all still there, along with about 20 AT400s people had spawned in Grove St lolz.

 

Problem was with the server having to keep track of all those spawned vehicles it would slow down to a crawl and eventually collapse

[johnlee]

I think you miss the point that video games are a product of entertainment made to make money, if it was easy to make the game like you say then I am sure they would spend the time to work it out. They have deadlines and budgets to stick to so that the end result makes a profit for the company.

I see where you are coming from and you are correct that bottom line it is a BUSINESS with the shareholders interests at heart. (that is the only LEGAL obligation of a public company TTWO anyway..)

 

Technological difficulties aside, the gaming industry is first and foremost a business and from that perspective it makes little sense to invest heavily in features where there is almost zero immediate return on investment for any major developer or

publisher to produce such an attempt at this kind of game/simulation. If the current macroeconomic state of affairs of the world are any indicator, there may never be a something that I described.

 

NOT to get offtopic, but if R* could make our lives easier and more fun at the VERY LEAST they didn't need to make it HARDER and more annoying...

 

Such as:

 

1. Why do I have to access the GAME first in order to get to the video editor? Why Do I have to have the video editor open and on focus to render a video, why can't I minimize it and do other stuff when it is rendering? I have Quad core for a reason.... Vray even has commandline rendering that doesn't even need 3ds max, likewise the render should be made separable from the game itself...

 

2. Why do I NEED to initially setup Rockstar Social Club and Games for Windows Live if I only want to play singleplayer? Why does RGSC.exe load at EVERY BOOTUP and hog a space in my system tray? I disable it in msconfig but next time it starts up all by itself again!!!! Annoying!

 

3. Why do they make it such a pain in the rear end to save games or to share save games, to backup saved games or restore saved games? It takes a modern geek to do it correctly these days as the average gamer will have NO CLUE to backup the Xlive folder as well as the Rockstar folder in the hidden section of application data local settings and Vista doesn't help matters having to run everything in the "real" admin mode either...

 

 

 

 

[DeepSnoozer]

i will add more:

 

IT'S JUST A GAME!

[Svip]

There was an early GTASA multiplayer mod that i remember where vehicles you spawned remained on the map nomatter how far outside the "bubble" you went. One time we were messing about spawning loads of packers in the stormdrain, left the game and went back on 48 hours later and they were all still there, along with about 20 AT400s people had spawmed in Grove St lolz.

 

Problem was with the server having to keep track of all those spawned vehicles it would slow down to a crawl and eventually collapse

Obviously. Interestingly, the cars in GTA1 were all in the memory constantly, so you could technically rid the entire city for cars in the end. Only cars created by missions were new ones.

[creat3d22]

There was a mod like that for single-player SA too, "remembering" all the cars you left all over the place.

I don't recall installing it, but such a mod for IV would be so awesome Assuming the game wouldn't slow down to a crawl...