Find rare car (BOOM ) its everwhere !

November 25, 2012

You heard it here folks. Car clumping is literally impossible to fix. Along with purchaseable properties. Its all too impossible I'm afraid. athe technology just isnt there.

November 25, 2012

GTA IV didn't introduce this, it's was already in GTA III. It has something to with performance, it's easier for the game to only load a few select car models at a time.

This^

This has been since GTA III.

November 25, 2012

GTA IV didn't introduce this, it's was already in GTA III. It has something to with performance, it's easier for the game to only load a few select car models at a time.

This^

This has been since GTA III.

I already said in all gta games

November 25, 2012

You heard it here folks. Car clumping is literally impossible to fix. Along with purchaseable properties. Its all too impossible I'm afraid. athe technology just isnt there.

Yes, supposedly Saints Row, Mafia and other open world games didnt have this issue becouse they were running on next gen consoles.........oh wait.

November 25, 2012

GTA2 wins again.

However, K^2, could it not be solved by simply maintaining the low spawn rate of rare cars, despite having loaded the model? It might seem like a waste, but I suppose that the game is always keeping common cars in its immediate memory, such as taxis.

And hell, for it to spawn to begin with, how did we ever get here? I am not convinced that it is not fixable.

November 25, 2012

In Vice City, if you drove the Deluxo, Sand King or Sabre GT those cars didn't spawn. Maybe they could implement something like this for certain rare exotics.

November 25, 2012

It's easy to spawn multiple diverse cars but the graphics cards won't be able to handle it without lots of optimization.

Why don't you tell us where you propose to store the texture information for all of these diverse cars that are so easy to spawn.

does this happens in other games ?? I only find it in GTA games

oh sorry double post , I don’t know how to quote more than one

Different games deal with this problem differently. There are other games with similar behavior, though.

Basically, it comes down to this. VRAM is very limited. It is, however, where all the textures you are going to display have to be, and textures are what takes up most of the space in the game. The problem becomes apparent. A game with several GB of textures cannot have all of them loaded in 512MB of VRAM. (Consoles would have access to only fraction of even that.) Naturally, if your game has multiple levels, you only need to load textures for that level. That tends to be the most common way to manage this. But what about a free-roam game? That's where streaming comes along. Resources are constantly being moved between HDD, RAM, and VRAM.

One of the resources that takes up considerable space is vehicle textures. There are several ways to go about dealing with that. You can do without textures at all or just few detail textures, you can reduce texture resolution, or you can have only a handful of them in memory at once. Problem with low resolution textures is immediately apparent. It might be ok for some background stuff in many games, but not for GTA. If you look at racing games with other vehicles on the road, you'll often see that they have low poly models and low resolution texture. It allows for great variety in traffic, and low quality doesn't bother you because you are racing past these cars faster than you can make out details. Only the racing cars need to be highly detailed, and there will be just a few of these.

Second option is doing away with textures all together. Cars tend to have a fairly uniform look, and most of the car's appearance can be achieved with geometry. Simply make a higher resolution model, do more advanced lighting, and you are done. If something's missing, details can be filled in with a small texture for these parts. This is great for rendering a few cars. But you try to render a street full of them, and your graphics card simply won't be able to keep up with it. So geometry complexity has to be reduced, and that introduces need for texture to prevent cars from looking like toys.

Finally we arrive at GTA's solution. Load cars you need into memory, and unload them as they become unnecessary. Now, having only a few cars in memory, the car spawn algorithm will have to rely mostly on these cars. And since car you are driving absolutely has to be loaded, it is one of these few cars that will be used to spawn traffic. Naturally, the spawn algorithm doesn't have to spawn the car you are driving. But then, it's one less car it has to work with. Add to it the fact that the game usually keeps track of your previous car, so that it doesn't despawn the moment you get out of it, and you are short of two car models you could have used. Plus, it needs to keep some reserved spots to spawn any new stuff that might be needed for missions or whatever. And if you restrict the spawn algorithm from using these, it significantly shrinks the pool of available car models, and suddenly, all the car it spawns are the same 2-3 models. That could be just as annoying as seeing copies of your car.

There are ways to optimize it a little better. IV definitely isn't the best R* can do. And V will probably have some improvements. But the problem is pretty fundamental one.

To add quotes, just use these tags.

Quoted text.

November 25, 2012

I hated it too

November 25, 2012

Different games deal with this problem differently. There are other games with similar behavior, though.

Basically, it comes down to this. VRAM is very limited. It is, however, where all the textures you are going to display have to be, and textures are what takes up most of the space in the game. The problem becomes apparent. A game with several GB of textures cannot have all of them loaded in 512MB of VRAM. (Consoles would have access to only fraction of even that.) Naturally, if your game has multiple levels, you only need to load textures for that level. That tends to be the most common way to manage this. But what about a free-roam game? That's where streaming comes along. Resources are constantly being moved between HDD, RAM, and VRAM.

One of the resources that takes up considerable space is vehicle textures. There are several ways to go about dealing with that. You can do without textures at all or just few detail textures, you can reduce texture resolution, or you can have only a handful of them in memory at once. Problem with low resolution textures is immediately apparent. It might be ok for some background stuff in many games, but not for GTA. If you look at racing games with other vehicles on the road, you'll often see that they have low poly models and low resolution texture. It allows for great variety in traffic, and low quality doesn't bother you because you are racing past these cars faster than you can make out details. Only the racing cars need to be highly detailed, and there will be just a few of these.

Second option is doing away with textures all together. Cars tend to have a fairly uniform look, and most of the car's appearance can be achieved with geometry. Simply make a higher resolution model, do more advanced lighting, and you are done. If something's missing, details can be filled in with a small texture for these parts. This is great for rendering a few cars. But you try to render a street full of them, and your graphics card simply won't be able to keep up with it. So geometry complexity has to be reduced, and that introduces need for texture to prevent cars from looking like toys.

Finally we arrive at GTA's solution. Load cars you need into memory, and unload them as they become unnecessary. Now, having only a few cars in memory, the car spawn algorithm will have to rely mostly on these cars. And since car you are driving absolutely has to be loaded, it is one of these few cars that will be used to spawn traffic. Naturally, the spawn algorithm doesn't have to spawn the car you are driving. But then, it's one less car it has to work with. Add to it the fact that the game usually keeps track of your previous car, so that it doesn't despawn the moment you get out of it, and you are short of two car models you could have used. Plus, it needs to keep some reserved spots to spawn any new stuff that might be needed for missions or whatever. And if you restrict the spawn algorithm from using these, it significantly shrinks the pool of available car models, and suddenly, all the car it spawns are the same 2-3 models. That could be just as annoying as seeing copies of your car.

There are ways to optimize it a little better. IV definitely isn't the best R* can do. And V will probably have some improvements. But the problem is pretty fundamental one.

Highly interesting stuff. Never knew the details. Thx for that summary!

November 25, 2012

I remember R* boasting how they fixed that problem in GTA4 and look - they haven't!

November 25, 2012