Do you think they fixed the car you're in spawning everywhere?

[sinceGTAIII]

not sure if anyone covered this. Memory is like energy, it's doesn't matter how much we save or have we'll always use it. Any of the GTA games could have addressed this issue, but it means depriving memory somewhere else so the question will always be, is total random vehicle spawn worth say another meter in draw distance, or can we live without traffic jams or dense population to achieve random spawns? Factor in that vehicles are area-specific, so they need to occupy memory even if they aren't being "used" by peds and exist solely for jacking and even when jacked, the user can only use one car at a time, but all those other parked cars still need memory. Vehicle caching solves a lot of problems and allows memory to be taken up by other things, better explosions, more varied NPC behavior etc...

 

GTA have done a few things to artfully address the problem. For one, even though you can't usually find a bitchin' fast car in a jam, you can usually find something fast-ish, in comparison to III or Vice City. Another thing is slightly-modified versions of cars, like the Sentinal and the Sentinal XL (or whatever it is). So if you were programming two versions of the same car it would be something like this:

 

var carOne = new Sentinal("Libery City Black"); // just a color paremeter would indicate a standard sentinal

var carTwo = new Sentinal("Liberty City Black", addDetailing, addSuspension, "Sentinal XL"); // the other parameters would indicate a modified version.

 

In the above example, carTwo is just piggy packing on the memory allocated to carOne, it isn't free, there will be some additional overhead but it's alot cheaper than running a bunch of different models. Plus, it also means that since the objects are already in memory they can be copied without the process of loading a model into memory, which again translates to free memory for other things.

 

However, with GTA online, it seems they would have real need to increase it's allotment of random vehicles since we'll have up to 16 players with, presumably, different cars and mods. It could be that 16 or 32 or 64 is a lucky number as human beings begin to differentiate less and less and the more variety is added it may appear to us, while engaged in the game, that true random spawn has been implemented, but on closer inspection patterns will appear. I guess I'm saying that there may be no real fix, except reaching a "critical mass" of vehicles where it's impossible to validate recursive vehicles without doing pen & paper calculations.

 

And the simple answer would be that "true" random is impossible and at the very least would eat up alot of memory in accomplishing it. but I could be wrong.

 

At least we won't have an endless string of cabs by our porno studio :-)

[dewan2000]

Theoretically, if GTAV came to next gen do you think they would be able to solve this? or do you think there would still not be enough RAM. I know theres 8GB RAM on PS4, how much is there on PS3?

 

And those questions are directed at whoever reads them

 

To an extent yes, if they tweaked with the settings and made it so there are a wider variety on the road. You will most likely still see some duplicates, but with games such as these you still want to reserve some memory. It could go to better use, such as addressing pop-in issues or having further LOD distances.

[Scottyhg1]

i remember in gta 4 when u looked behind than looked forward than behind there would either be different cars or no cars that was annoying

[Twiggy123]

There was an interview that stated that the different areas will have certain types of cars. So, in a way, yes the spawning issue has been fixed.

[Red Hat]

If you are driving a rare car then if you hit somewhere and don't want to use cheats then you can just hijack another one on the roads.

[Glennyman]

I hope this is "fixed" I wanna own and drive a rare car and not see it everywhere else to...

[RobinTheBrave]

Shouldn't you be able to fix this by just spawning a lot of a certain type of car in certain areas? Like in the poor areas, spawn more of the less expensive cars, and in the rich areas just spawn more of another type of car... But what the hell do I know, I'm not a programmer.

[[email protected]]

If only there was a more powerful system such as a PC or even a PS4 or Xbone? We would be able to solve this problem? Maybe even aolve the jagged edges with some AA?

 

On a more serious note I am impressed by what Rockstar has achieved on the current gen with GTA V. Gameplay and size wise it is incredible. Instant character switching more than makes up for having the same cars in traffic, though in the trailers thw traffic does seem quite diverse? Like Trailer 2 when Michael is saving Jimmy on the highway I don't see any duplicates?

[Nillus]

PS3 and Xbox 360 have no more than 512 MB of memory for working with both game data and video output. That's nothing these days and it's severely limiting what the consoles can do in terms of memory and texture resolution.

 

The PS4 has 8 GB of memory. This will allow Rockstar to load in higher, if not the highest versions of the production textures. You have to consider that they're probably running with supercompressed / superlow textures. Better CPU's and more RAM will also offer them the juice that a game like this needs to run on 1080p resolution with 4-8x anti aliasing. (smoothing out the jaggies in every rendered frame)

 

It will also allow them to expand other data stores in the RAM memory, such as memory and caches for cars and peds. This indeed will allow a much greater variety of vehicle models and states to be in memory at the same time. Still, the game doesn't have to memorize all vehicles in the game. Just the surroundings of the current player. Most are just random spawns based on templates on disk.

Edited September 8, 2013 by Nillus