A cheap way Rockstar Toranto did for cars far away

[Chunk3y]

You know how the cars inside the console version are only displayed as lights far away? Well inside the PC version you can see cars from as far as the eye can see, but by looking more closer you can see that all they did is add cheap looking small cars moving at the same speed 5 feet apart EVERYWHERE. Which probally means that it is just a 3d model just going on the road. I was pretty exicted seeing all those cars but when I went down closer with my heli nearly all of the cars dissapeared and I only saw 4 cars in my view. So all they did is just really put a bunch of fake cars on the road when you are far away.

[dr.whiz]

yep.

 

this phenomenon is most noticeable when playing multiplayer since typically all you do is run around looking for a car in a car empty city, while you can always see those magical cars in the horizon wherever you look. i almost got excited the first time i noticed this since i thought i finally found a street with cars on.

 

edit: i think this was a clever implementation. the first aerial screenshot i saw before i played the game had all these cars all over the city, and i got upset thinking how much cpu is wasted on calculating ai for cars you can barely see. so this solution was a natural one i think.

Edited December 31, 2008 by dr.whiz

[rud]

I wish they'd at least made an attempt to tie it to the actual traffic density, so a completely packed street didn't turn out to be totally barren when approached. Still I think it had to be done too and it's at least slightly better looking than the console versions, in this one little respect at least. The games got enough performance problems as is...

[Jc84144]

Wow, I don't get it. You get people who bitch about all those small low poly cars being draw and slowing the game down, and now people who bitch about them not being real cars?

 

Anyway, it's either this or nothing (a dead looking city in the distance). If each one turned into a real car, the game would have to track the location of each of those cars, which would slow things down.

[JeffPwick]

yea thats not good

[dr.whiz]

Wow, I don't get it. You get people who bitch about all those small low poly cars being draw and slowing the game down, and now people who bitch about them not being real cars?

 

Anyway, it's either this or nothing (a dead looking city in the distance). If each one turned into a real car, the game would have to track the location of each of those cars, which would slow things down.

i think the op just felt like commenting on it since he got excited only to find out they are all "fake" cars.

 

anyway, apart from that, i haven't seen anyone actually complain about this, not in this thread or any other thread, so there's no need for you to get upset. like i just said above, i think it was a pretty clever idea.

[OverTheBelow]

I like it. I prefer it much more to an empty city. It's just when you descend in a helicopter they all vanish, but that is unavoidable anyway.

[Dcrysis02]

I like it. I prefer it much more to an empty city. It's just when you descend in a helicopter they all vanish, but that is unavoidable anyway.

Yeah but you can't snipe in this version.Peds dissappear about 30feet away.That's a shame.

[Psycold]

the only annoying part about this for me is it makes it impossible to find a target with the helicopter, if I want to pick a car out to hunt down, it doesn't work because the car will appear too late. I was playing GTAIV on my friends Xbox last night and I noticed the Xbox ALSO HAS TEXTURE POP-IN! It happens quite frequently but I guess Xbox players never noticed, it's just not as extreme as the PC version. This makes me think that the texture pop in problem will never be fixed, since it was there for the console versions, it's just a part of how the game was made.