Svip Posted December 19, 2008 Share Posted December 19, 2008 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... It probably would. Have you noticed the details on the cars in GTA IV compared to SA? Yeah, they can get a lot of different dents, these are parameters, but those are a lot of sophisticated parameters. Now in order to store that - for all cars, and I have noticed there are more cars on the road than there are in SA in GTA IV - it would take an immense amount of memory, which would then be swapped onto harddisk when it runs out. But let's assume you have enough RAM to handle all that. Do you have any idea how long it would take to search through such an array of cars and peds? Oh, don't get me f*cking started here. Rockstar Games created a games that could be run on more lower-end hardware, why? Cause they could sell it to more people. In addition, the "bubble" concept is a common feature to avoid giant arrays that will take ages to search through. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
johnlee Posted December 19, 2008 Author Share Posted December 19, 2008 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... Maybe this is where the "future proofing" comes into play? When the average system has 16Gb of ram or something? Kind of like running the original Midtown Madness on my Quad core today... Of course by then we would be on to newer and better games (GTAV or something else entirely...) BUT EVEN THEN, why did R* LOCKDOWN the game with files.txt and hashed this and encrypted that to make it virtually impossible to mod???? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AussieDude Posted December 19, 2008 Share Posted December 19, 2008 if the whole city was rendered in one out side of the so called "Bubble"there would be no Pop ins! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
creat3d22 Posted December 19, 2008 Share Posted December 19, 2008 It probably would. Have you noticed the details on the cars in GTA IV compared to SA? Yeah, they can get a lot of different dents, these are parameters, but those are a lot of sophisticated parameters. Now in order to store that - for all cars, and I have noticed there are more cars on the road than there are in SA in GTA IV - it would take an immense amount of memory, which would then be swapped onto harddisk when it runs out. But let's assume you have enough RAM to handle all that. Do you have any idea how long it would take to search through such an array of cars and peds? Oh, don't get me f*cking started here. Rockstar Games created a games that could be run on more lower-end hardware, why? Cause they could sell it to more people. In addition, the "bubble" concept is a common feature to avoid giant arrays that will take ages to search through. It would indeed be a lot of data to store for something that isn't essential, but I'm sure there are ways around it... Maybe saving it to files on the HDD, one for each neighborhood, only loading the file used in your present "bubble". Wishful thinking aside, I'm sure we'll see increased realism of that sort not too far down the line... BUT EVEN THEN, why did R* LOCKDOWN the game with files.txt and hashed this and encrypted that to make it virtually impossible to mod???? They did block it through files.txt, hashing etc... but it's so simple to get around it, the .dat and other files are so easy to mod (ie. notepad) one has to wonder if they didn't intentionally make it EASIER to mod this time around... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
johnlee Posted December 19, 2008 Author Share Posted December 19, 2008 They did block it through files.txt, hashing etc... but it's so simple to get around it, the .dat and other files are so easy to mod (ie. notepad) one has to wonder if they didn't intentionally make it EASIER to mod this time around... Honestly that's what I thought at first as well.. If that is the case then all the better, but why would they intentionally play mind games with us like that??? That is still being dishonest. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
creat3d22 Posted December 19, 2008 Share Posted December 19, 2008 Honestly that's what I thought at first as well.. If that is the case then all the better, but why would they intentionally play mind games with us like that??? Maybe so the less experienced users don't f*ck up their game? Which I can appreciate, otherwise there would be ten times more "THE GAME DOESN'T WORK!!!" threads around here. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JBFord4x4 Posted December 19, 2008 Share Posted December 19, 2008 What about the random road work and world effects that stay permanent? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
johnlee Posted December 19, 2008 Author Share Posted December 19, 2008 Honestly that's what I thought at first as well.. If that is the case then all the better, but why would they intentionally play mind games with us like that??? Maybe so the less experienced users don't f*ck up their game? Which I can appreciate, otherwise there would be ten times more "THE GAME DOESN'T WORK!!!" threads around here. Unlikely, if the user changed any values at all (even benign little changes like increase speed or whatever) the game wouldn't load at all. (unless we used the magiciv patch) So if anything they are punishing users for accidentally "messing up their game" by purposely locking down the game for good if they make any changes at all.... This is worlds apart from Crysis and the beauty of the Crytek 2 Editor where you can edit the map in real-time and enter the game in WYSIWYG mode state of the art editor that yields immediate results... I remember when games had developers coming out with the SDK kit almost at the same time the game went gold and actively ENCOURAGING members to mod it and build up a modding community.... Sure doesn't seem that way with R* and GTAIV... Even backing up saved games is a nightmare... And they all but made TRAINERS for this game impossible.... Doesn't SEEM like good intentions to me... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
postem Posted December 19, 2008 Share Posted December 19, 2008 One of the things that I love about games like GTAIV is its "immersion" and atmosphere. The breathing, living, interactive city/world really appeals to me. Instead of a game like PMDG where all you do is fly realistic airliner simulations, or Crysis where all you do is shoot and look at pretty graphics, or GRID Racer where all you do is drive, Ship Simulator etc you get the point... GTAIV is an all-around game that includes a little of everything EDIT: People asking what is the point of my thread (and you have so I am updating..) should read threads of this nature: http://www.gtaforums.com/index.php?showtop...entry1058781979 GTAIV is an all-around game that includes a little of everything.. It is like a jack of all trades but a master of none. (no expert specialization in any one area) But I like a game that ties it all together and puts it into one coherent comprehensive package even if its just a start.. But after playing around with the files on the GTAIV PC version I realized something. R* is an expert magician that is very good at creating the ILLUSION of a living breathing city and sell us the grandeur based on an elaborately and well done smokes and mirrors system. GTAIV Liberty City is essentially a blank and empty city with no cars, no pedestrians and no actions or events. After tweaking the files I figured it out myself... 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. If you have ever seen the movie "the 13th floor" you will by now know EXACTLY what I am talking about... 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???? I see. sh*t shadows like a newspaper give the ilusion of being with cerebral cancer. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Svip Posted December 19, 2008 Share Posted December 19, 2008 It probably would. Have you noticed the details on the cars in GTA IV compared to SA? Yeah, they can get a lot of different dents, these are parameters, but those are a lot of sophisticated parameters. Now in order to store that - for all cars, and I have noticed there are more cars on the road than there are in SA in GTA IV - it would take an immense amount of memory, which would then be swapped onto harddisk when it runs out. But let's assume you have enough RAM to handle all that. Do you have any idea how long it would take to search through such an array of cars and peds? Oh, don't get me f*cking started here. Rockstar Games created a games that could be run on more lower-end hardware, why? Cause they could sell it to more people. In addition, the "bubble" concept is a common feature to avoid giant arrays that will take ages to search through. It would indeed be a lot of data to store for something that isn't essential, but I'm sure there are ways around it... Maybe saving it to files on the HDD, one for each neighborhood, only loading the file used in your present "bubble". Wishful thinking aside, I'm sure we'll see increased realism of that sort not too far down the line... Wishful thinking indeed, your solution with different neighbourhoods, doesn't even begin to fulfil our friend's need, he wants the city to keep moving in the background, which also requires a lot of CPU time. Most people think that most of the computation time is done rendering graphics, but a lot more is done actually performing the tasks for those things that make the city seem real. A lot more, especially given how most rendering issues are handled by the GPU these days. The game already has to take in consideration of a lot. There are many ways Rockstar does to get around using too many resources. One of them is for instance to make new instances of cars "dummies". This means that when a new car appears, either in a car park or on the street, it is featureless. All it is a car of a specific type and it may contain one or more peds, but since peds are represented by different objects, their positions are simply just based upon that of the car. But again, I don't think the physics engine takes over here, that would be too much. They are just linked to the car. But once the player addresses a car, either by smashing it a bit, stealing it or something else, the car becomes more than just that dummy it was previously, it gets parameters, etc. And these cars take up more space in the RAM than the dummies. You can test for yourself. Go to a car park, be sure there are plenty of cars there, begin piling different cars in a circle or something. Notice how the cars parked in the car park does not disappear, but those in the pile may after a while, even though they are clearly within "the bubble". Reasoning? The game itself gives a limit/roof of how much RAM per item can be used at a current time. Which is also why cars will stop appearing once you start making wreckage, or at least not appear in so big numbers. In other words, you have no idea how many issues your wishful thinking would actually provide, and it will be a slow hog to crawl. Too much data would have to be stashed and stored. And not to mention that harddrive write time are slow as hell. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
johnlee Posted December 19, 2008 Author Share Posted December 19, 2008 (edited) It probably would. Have you noticed the details on the cars in GTA IV compared to SA? Yeah, they can get a lot of different dents, these are parameters, but those are a lot of sophisticated parameters. Now in order to store that - for all cars, and I have noticed there are more cars on the road than there are in SA in GTA IV - it would take an immense amount of memory, which would then be swapped onto harddisk when it runs out. But let's assume you have enough RAM to handle all that. Do you have any idea how long it would take to search through such an array of cars and peds? Oh, don't get me f*cking started here. Rockstar Games created a games that could be run on more lower-end hardware, why? Cause they could sell it to more people. In addition, the "bubble" concept is a common feature to avoid giant arrays that will take ages to search through. It would indeed be a lot of data to store for something that isn't essential, but I'm sure there are ways around it... Maybe saving it to files on the HDD, one for each neighborhood, only loading the file used in your present "bubble". Wishful thinking aside, I'm sure we'll see increased realism of that sort not too far down the line... Wishful thinking indeed, your solution with different neighbourhoods, doesn't even begin to fulfil our friend's need, he wants the city to keep moving in the background, which also requires a lot of CPU time. Most people think that most of the computation time is done rendering graphics, but a lot more is done actually performing the tasks for those things that make the city seem real. A lot more, especially given how most rendering issues are handled by the GPU these days. The game already has to take in consideration of a lot. There are many ways Rockstar does to get around using too many resources. One of them is for instance to make new instances of cars "dummies". This means that when a new car appears, either in a car park or on the street, it is featureless. All it is a car of a specific type and it may contain one or more peds, but since peds are represented by different objects, their positions are simply just based upon that of the car. But again, I don't think the physics engine takes over here, that would be too much. They are just linked to the car. But once the player addresses a car, either by smashing it a bit, stealing it or something else, the car becomes more than just that dummy it was previously, it gets parameters, etc. And these cars take up more space in the RAM than the dummies. You can test for yourself. Go to a car park, be sure there are plenty of cars there, begin piling different cars in a circle or something. Notice how the cars parked in the car park does not disappear, but those in the pile may after a while, even though they are clearly within "the bubble". Reasoning? The game itself gives a limit/roof of how much RAM per item can be used at a current time. Which is also why cars will stop appearing once you start making wreckage, or at least not appear in so big numbers. In other words, you have no idea how many issues your wishful thinking would actually provide, and it will be a slow hog to crawl. Too much data would have to be stashed and stored. And not to mention that harddrive write time are slow as hell. Well true, but it doesn't have to be all black and white, all or nothing. It could be stepwise and gradual continuum from here to there... Like a slider that you can increase if your system is on the high end if you want more 'realism" and more true interactivity etc... So make the option there at least, for "Future proofing"... BTW I still don't understand why the Xbox360 with only 512Ram for CPU &GPU could already do this (play at good framerates and render quality) yet my PC with 4GB of faster ram performs WORSE (namely the 20ft ped_in_car cap that I mentioned in another thread...) My point is if they programmed GTAIV from the ground up to be optimized code for the PC (like Crysis did) perhaps we could have much better functionality today at the SAME level of framerates... (this by the way is not wishful thinking... the xbox version is much more optimized and it shows....) If GTA4 for PC had been equally optimized then the leftover performance could be used to increase the size of the "bubble" Edited December 19, 2008 by johnlee Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Skythe Posted December 19, 2008 Share Posted December 19, 2008 You seriously didn't know this before hand? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
trx Posted December 19, 2008 Share Posted December 19, 2008 no sh*t sherlock qft also: pretty colors, now can we move on? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Grand Theft Auto Dude Posted December 19, 2008 Share Posted December 19, 2008 I actually heard about a new game that renders all peds and vehicles on the map at one time, it doesn't use a 'bubble' and simulated a proper, living, breathing world with no smoke or mirrors. It sounds pretty awesome, it's called RL. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AMDdude Posted December 19, 2008 Share Posted December 19, 2008 OH NOEESS!.... is this thread for real? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JBFord4x4 Posted December 19, 2008 Share Posted December 19, 2008 Again "johnlee", what about the roadwork and permanent damage done to the atmosphere? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bokman Posted December 19, 2008 Share Posted December 19, 2008 DUH Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DXWarlock Posted December 19, 2008 Share Posted December 19, 2008 should cars have to be shipped in to replace the ones you slowly wreck and destroy? and people showing up in moving vans to move in to replace the ones you killed?, you would run out of cars and people to kill eventually if not.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bauer Posted December 19, 2008 Share Posted December 19, 2008 I heard that "outdoors" is very realistic. Maybe you should try that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gutslab Posted December 19, 2008 Share Posted December 19, 2008 shoutouts to johnlee Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
creat3d22 Posted December 19, 2008 Share Posted December 19, 2008 Wishful thinking indeed, your solution with different neighbourhoods, doesn't even begin to fulfil our friend's need, he wants the city to keep moving in the background, which also requires a lot of CPU time. Most people think that most of the computation time is done rendering graphics, but a lot more is done actually performing the tasks for those things that make the city seem real. A lot more, especially given how most rendering issues are handled by the GPU these days. The game already has to take in consideration of a lot. There are many ways Rockstar does to get around using too many resources. One of them is for instance to make new instances of cars "dummies". This means that when a new car appears, either in a car park or on the street, it is featureless. All it is a car of a specific type and it may contain one or more peds, but since peds are represented by different objects, their positions are simply just based upon that of the car. But again, I don't think the physics engine takes over here, that would be too much. They are just linked to the car. But once the player addresses a car, either by smashing it a bit, stealing it or something else, the car becomes more than just that dummy it was previously, it gets parameters, etc. And these cars take up more space in the RAM than the dummies. You can test for yourself. Go to a car park, be sure there are plenty of cars there, begin piling different cars in a circle or something. Notice how the cars parked in the car park does not disappear, but those in the pile may after a while, even though they are clearly within "the bubble". Reasoning? The game itself gives a limit/roof of how much RAM per item can be used at a current time. Which is also why cars will stop appearing once you start making wreckage, or at least not appear in so big numbers. In other words, you have no idea how many issues your wishful thinking would actually provide, and it will be a slow hog to crawl. Too much data would have to be stashed and stored. And not to mention that harddrive write time are slow as hell. Of course it would be massively impractical. My "wishful thinking" wasn't for a completely living city, with every single cubic meter processed at all times, just a way to keep track of trashed cars. Regardless of current technical possibilities... I'm sure within the near future we'll see more and more realism that wasn't possible before or thought of. Nowhere near a fully simulated city 24/7, but better ways to simulate things happening on the other end of that city and "remembering" what happens in that virtual world... johnlee's idea of calculating the probability of something happening in a particular area while you aren't there isn't too far fetched... we'll just have to wait and see how real it can get. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sushir Posted December 19, 2008 Share Posted December 19, 2008 One of the things that I love about games like GTAIV is its "immersion" and atmosphere. The breathing, living, interactive city/world really appeals to me. Instead of a game like PMDG where all you do is fly realistic airliner simulations, or Crysis where all you do is shoot and look at pretty graphics, or GRID Racer where all you do is drive, Ship Simulator etc you get the point... GTAIV is an all-around game that includes a little of everything EDIT: People asking what is the point of my thread (and you have so I am updating..) should read threads of this nature: http://www.gtaforums.com/index.php?showtop...entry1058781979 GTAIV is an all-around game that includes a little of everything.. It is like a jack of all trades but a master of none. (no expert specialization in any one area) But I like a game that ties it all together and puts it into one coherent comprehensive package even if its just a start.. But after playing around with the files on the GTAIV PC version I realized something. R* is an expert magician that is very good at creating the ILLUSION of a living breathing city and sell us the grandeur based on an elaborately and well done smokes and mirrors system. GTAIV Liberty City is essentially a blank and empty city with no cars, no pedestrians and no actions or events. After tweaking the files I figured it out myself... 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. If you have ever seen the movie "the 13th floor" you will by now know EXACTLY what I am talking about... 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???? ... and at last major whining meets Donkey Kong ! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TOOL1075 Posted December 19, 2008 Share Posted December 19, 2008 despite the genuine (almost fascinating) sincerity and concern of the original poster's initial arguments, this thread was doomed from the beginning to be, and now definitely is, how you say...... full of what we call.... "FAIL." Play the damn game. Jesus f*cking christ.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RCagent Posted December 19, 2008 Share Posted December 19, 2008 (edited) When I read the topic title I was going to assume it was going to be some sort of praise on how well Rockstar was able to emulate a city environment. What I got instead was one hell of a laugh. I guess I can see where you are going with it, but this is a game first and a simulation second. How old are you Johnlee? I remember when I was 6, after playing around with some games I had wanted to make the games better than the ones I played by giving them unrealistic terms of scale. Its kind of funny now because I understand the technical retardedness. But yeah, GTA:IV isn't meant to create a life for each person you see, they try to emulate one. One thing I'd atleast like to see is if it you follow a ambulance it actually can go park at the hospital or have police cars go back to the police station, just as long as you follow them. Edited December 19, 2008 by RCagent Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
keta-trypt Posted December 19, 2008 Share Posted December 19, 2008 hey to the OP: I know exactly what you mean... I dont understand why others dont. Stalker: shawdow of churnobyl... people that die NEVER get erased. ive walked completly across the map, and come back to a big pile of bodies, weapons, and whatever else was left behind.. you can restart the game as many times as you want... the bodys remain.. as does everything else I will be walking along the usual path and come across a fraction war.. in a place there wasnt even any AI before. or prehaps some mutants are attacking bandits. maybe the mutants killed all of the bandits before I got there. Or maybe theres some bandits there ready to attack me. Bandits wander the HOLE map at a realistic walking speed.. you may run into them, or maybe not. If you see them, but they dont see you, you can stage an assualt further on down the map where it might be easier to deal with them..then they might suprize you, and take an unexpected path(for the exeption of the NPP area) ok yes if you leave one part of the map, and return, there are places where bandits respawn EVERY time, no matter what, but the bodies of the bandits I killed the last time I was there remain on the ground. but its suppost to represent their "base" Stalker: Clear sky- Same deal. dead bodys remain. Random things happen. even better yet, you can conquor the enemy's base... or you dont have to.. The point is, even if you leave the immediate area, the AI remains, and random things happen even if your in a completly different area.. you may go on a mission, and when you get back, you find out a major battle happened, with bodies everywhere. (haha ammo scavange time) Fallout 3: bodys and wepons remain for a reallllly long time. Although it was simple, in GTA:SA there were random turf wars. Even though you may be across the other side of the city. And all of these games I talk about dont require a supercomputer to run them. Actually, even with settings maxed to the limit (at 1680x1050), they run better then GTA4 does with everything turned to the minumim. Even clearskies, which was released just a few weeks ago... not 6 months ago. it IS possible Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JasonThummel Posted December 19, 2008 Share Posted December 19, 2008 OP: Where do you buy your drugs? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
El Dildo Posted December 19, 2008 Share Posted December 19, 2008 too long didn't read the OP needs to get laid... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
One-time Posted December 19, 2008 Share Posted December 19, 2008 Those red, yellow, green, orange text hurts my eyes! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
proh1 Posted December 19, 2008 Share Posted December 19, 2008 ENOUGH SAID. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
INFP Posted December 19, 2008 Share Posted December 19, 2008 This thread gave me a smile. Theres a couple great reasons it works the way it does. If it didn't this game would be even slower than it already is. But it put a smile on my face thinking about the 1000 car queue for the pay and spray after I'd been driving around and hitting everyone. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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