Possible to get unlimited blips/icons on San Andreas map ?

[Official General]

Hello all.

 

I am currently playing San Andreas in single player with a lot of mods and scripts and it's causing missing blips on my map, which can be a great hindrance to my gameplay.

 

Is it possible that there is a mod or tool that can greatly increase the amount of blips/icons appearing on the map ? Can this Open Limit Adjuster do the trick ?

[Richie Makyura]

I Think its imposible Because for the scripts.

 

PD: What Scripts you have?

[fastman92]

Can this Open Limit Adjuster do the trick ?

Open Limit Adjuster doesn't include this limit.

[OrionSR]

I believe that fastman92's Limit Adjuster is the preferred tool these days. I'm not terribly familiar with it's features but I suspect it will do the job that you are asking for. However, you may want to examine your saved blips for duplicates. Some cleo scripts have the nasty habit of adding a new blip, cargen, pickup, object or other saved item every time the save is loaded. Eventually these clog the pools and prevent new items. If this is the problem then a limits adjuster will only delay the problem until the next limit is reached.

 

Unfortunately, there are no good tools for managing blips. And even with my good hex editor templates, tracking down the blips in the save is still a difficult process. Removing them is easy enough once I find the right blips. But I'm working on a strategy to automate that process and if you've got the glitch I think you do then I could use a copy of your save to use as a sample.

 

Please post a link to your save on GTASnP.com. I'll take a look and let you know what I find, and do what I can to manually remove duplicate blips if I find them. It may take a while before my tools are finished but you'll have a working save to play with for a while - assuming you disable the offending scripts.

 

One test you can try. Start a new game and make a baseline save. Cheat, cleo, train your way to saving in slot 1, it won't effect the test. (Use any slot you want, I just wanted to be specific in the description.) Load slot 1 and save in slot 2. Keep reloading slot 2 and saving over slot 2 about a dozen times so I won't have any problem finding duplicates in the save. Or, if it's not too annoying, repeat the process until you can't create a map marker anymore. Post links to the before and after saves for comparison. Once you know which icons are created it'll be a little easier to track down the bad cleos.

Edited September 3, 2017 by OrionSR

[Official General]

I believe that fastman92's Limit Adjuster is the preferred tool these days. I'm not terribly familiar with it's features but I suspect it will do the job that you are asking for. However, you may want to examine your saved blips for duplicates. Some cleo scripts have the nasty habit of adding a new blip, cargen, pickup, object or other saved item every time the save is loaded. Eventually these clog the pools and prevent new items. If this is the problem then a limits adjuster will only delay the problem until the next limit is reached.

 

Unfortunately, there are no good tools for managing blips. And even with my good hex editor templates, tracking down the blips in the save is still a difficult process. Removing them is easy enough once I find the right blips. But I'm working on a strategy to automate that process and if you've got the glitch I think you do then I could use a copy of your save to use as a sample.

 

Please post a link to your save on GTASnP.com. I'll take a look and let you know what I find, and do what I can to manually remove duplicate blips if I find them. It may take a while before my tools are finished but you'll have a working save to play with for a while - assuming you disable the offending scripts.

 

One test you can try. Start a new game and make a baseline save. Cheat, cleo, train your way to saving in slot 1, it won't effect the test. (Use any slot you want, I just wanted to be specific in the description.) Load slot 1 and save in slot 2. Keep reloading slot 2 and saving over slot 2 about a dozen times so I won't have any problem finding duplicates in the save. Or, if it's not too annoying, repeat the process until you can't create a map marker anymore. Post links to the before and after saves for comparison. Once you know which icons are created it'll be a little easier to track down the bad cleos.

 

Thanks Orion and all you guys for the replies, it's really annoying me as I'm really enjoying story mode 10 times more with all my mods.

 

I will try and post my save tomorrow for you and let you know when I do

 

Thanks for your help once again.

[ZIONSAMODDER]

Is there a way to add icons without replacing them, I do not know if this is what you want

[Official General]

I believe that fastman92's Limit Adjuster is the preferred tool these days. I'm not terribly familiar with it's features but I suspect it will do the job that you are asking for. However, you may want to examine your saved blips for duplicates. Some cleo scripts have the nasty habit of adding a new blip, cargen, pickup, object or other saved item every time the save is loaded. Eventually these clog the pools and prevent new items. If this is the problem then a limits adjuster will only delay the problem until the next limit is reached.

 

Unfortunately, there are no good tools for managing blips. And even with my good hex editor templates, tracking down the blips in the save is still a difficult process. Removing them is easy enough once I find the right blips. But I'm working on a strategy to automate that process and if you've got the glitch I think you do then I could use a copy of your save to use as a sample.

 

Please post a link to your save on GTASnP.com. I'll take a look and let you know what I find, and do what I can to manually remove duplicate blips if I find them. It may take a while before my tools are finished but you'll have a working save to play with for a while - assuming you disable the offending scripts.

 

One test you can try. Start a new game and make a baseline save. Cheat, cleo, train your way to saving in slot 1, it won't effect the test. (Use any slot you want, I just wanted to be specific in the description.) Load slot 1 and save in slot 2. Keep reloading slot 2 and saving over slot 2 about a dozen times so I won't have any problem finding duplicates in the save. Or, if it's not too annoying, repeat the process until you can't create a map marker anymore. Post links to the before and after saves for comparison. Once you know which icons are created it'll be a little easier to track down the bad cleos.

 

http://gtasnp.com/SJtQWU

 

There is the link bro.

[OrionSR]

Extra Blips and GarGens Removed

This is a test save to see if my modifications are going to break your scripts. There are other serious issues in this save, like 45 too many objects, but if these easy tweaks crash the save then there's no point to more complicated edits. I'm going to poke around a little and see if there are any major issues that would break the save before going much further. Note: The blips are cargens are still in this save, but they're flags so the game should discard them for us when the save is loaded.

Blips - Dozens of Madd Dogg icons scattered about the map. Most seem to be duplicates of sets of 3, but there seemed to be some variation to the pattern. Regardless, there are no standard Madd Dogg icons on a House Party save so I flagged them all for removal. Any ideas which script is associated with these icons?

Car Generators - Standard is 208, most are associated with mission triggers or unlocks. Your cargen pool was maxed out at 500. When this pool is full the game won't be able to spawn the (usually) random vehicles along the side of the roads or in parking lots. You can add a lot of cargens to this pool, well over 100, without causing any problems, but your scripts can't create new ones every time they load a save.

These cargens seemed to be all messed up too. They looked a lot like experiments went wrong. Single use gargens, a feature that doesn't work without the SilentPatch, and lots of emptied or disabled cargens. And plenty of duplicates, but not always the same sets of cars. I suspect at least two scripts are messing with your cargens.

More notes to follow as discovered...

• Cities Unlocked hasn't been messed with, so the phone calls still work. That's good news.
• Unnamed global variables look okay, so it's less likely that any scripts are using globals inappropriately.
• GTASnP isn't detecting any glitches.
• Pickup pool looks good. There are even two records in the pool that have never been used.

Objects Galore

• 330, cellphone
• 1463, dyn_woodpile2
• 18631, NoModelFile, question mark placeholder model
• 18632, FishingRod
• 3409, grassplant, only one - didn't seem to be out out of control so I left it alone

(most) Extra Objects Removed

All of these saves crash my game, but that's not surprising for a modded save. They might work for you, or might not. I've no way to tell for sure.

 

The editor linked below has a tool to view cargens, objects and pickups. It doesn't have a tool for blips. SASE can be very useful for tracking down which scripts are corrupting San Andreas saves.

• GTA:SA Save Game Editor v1.0 by Ryosuke: http://gtasamod.web.fc2.com/tool/sase/index.html

Thanks for the glitchy save. It looks like it'll be very useful for testing automated repairs.

Edited September 3, 2017 by OrionSR

[Official General]

Extra Blips and GarGens Removed

 

This is a test save to see if my modifications are going to break your scripts. There are other serious issues in this save, like 45 too many objects, but if these easy tweaks crash the save then there's no point to more complicated edits. I'm going to poke around a little and see if there are any major issues that would break the save before going much further. Note: The blips are cargens are still in this save, but they're flags so the game should discard them for us when the save is loaded.

 

Blips - Dozens of Madd Dogg icons scattered about the map. Most seem to be duplicates of sets of 3, but there seemed to be some variation to the pattern. Regardless, there are no standard Madd Dogg icons on a House Party save so I flagged them all for removal. Any ideas which script is associated with these icons?

 

Car Generators - Standard is 208, most are associated with mission triggers or unlocks. Your cargen pool was maxed out at 500. When this pool is full the game won't be able to spawn the (usually) random vehicles along the side of the roads or in parking lots. You can add a lot of cargens to this pool, well over 100, without causing any problems, but your scripts can't create new ones every time they load a save.

 

These cargens seemed to be all messed up too. They looked a lot like experiments went wrong. Single use gargens, a feature that doesn't work without the SilentPatch, and lots of emptied or disabled cargens. And plenty of duplicates, but not always the same sets of cars. I suspect at least two scripts are messing with your cargens.

 

More notes to follow as discovered...

• Cities Unlocked hasn't been messed with, so the phone calls still work. That's good news.
• Unnamed global variables look okay, so it's less likely that any scripts are using globals inappropriately.
• GTASnP isn't detecting any glitches.
• Pickup pool looks good. There are even two records in the pool that have never been used.

Objects Galore

• 330, cellphone
• 1463, dyn_woodpile2
• 18631, NoModelFile, question mark placeholder model
• 18632, FishingRod
• 3409, grassplant, only one - didn't seem to be out out of control so I left it alone

(most) Extra Objects Removed

 

All of these saves crash my game, but that's not surprising for a modded save. They might work for you, or might not. I've no way to tell for sure.

 

The editor linked below has a tool to view cargens, objects and pickups. It doesn't have a tool for blips. SASE can be very useful for tracking down which scripts are corrupting San Andreas saves.

• GTA:SA Save Game Editor v1.0 by Ryosuke: http://gtasamod.web.fc2.com/tool/sase/index.html

Thanks for the glitchy save. It looks like it'll be very useful for testing automated repairs.

 

The Madd Dogg stuff I think are two drug dealer mods I have where there is a D marker on the map. The cargens stuff may be related to two mods I have involved parked cars. I'll try and remove them and see what I can come up with.

 

EDIT Thanks man !! You did a great job it's solved the problem......for now ! Knowing me I'll end up using another mod and causing the issue again. I take it this was just a temporary fix ?

Edited September 4, 2017 by Official General

[OrionSR]

Well, yeah. It's going to be temporary. Mostly because I'm afraid that you learned the wrong lesson. Most players learn early on that if they don't choose their cleo scripts carefully then they are probably going to break their save and there won't be any way to fix it. Usually I won't bother trying to fix saves corrupted by cleo scripts. You just got lucky and caught me collecting messed up saves for another project. Please take the lesson to heart. Be more careful.

 

Learn to examine your saves with SASE for common issues with globals, pickups, cargens and objects. And keep an eye out for saved blips. A clever script author can manage these items properly. When a good script is removed all features disappear with it. Use Sanny to decompile new scripts. If it's encrypted then don't use it. The scripts are often confusing at first, but with a little practice it doesn't usually take long to pick out potential issues.

 

Sanny makes it really easy for beginners to screw up saves in thousands of ways; I can't possibly hunt down everything. Unfortunately, most of the damage is caused by the same basic mistakes. Mistakes that are addressed very clearly in every cleo guide everywhere. Don't mess with global variables, pickups, cargens, icons, and objects unless you have a very clear understanding on how your modifications will affect the complete progression of the game.

[Official General]

Well, yeah. It's going to be temporary. Mostly because I'm afraid that you learned the wrong lesson. Most players learn early on that if they don't choose their cleo scripts carefully then they are probably going to break their save and there won't be any way to fix it. Usually I won't bother trying to fix saves corrupted by cleo scripts. You just got lucky and caught me collecting messed up saves for another project. Please take the lesson to heart. Be more careful.

 

Learn to examine your saves with SASE for common issues with globals, pickups, cargens and objects. And keep an eye out for saved blips. A clever script author can manage these items properly. When a good script is removed all features disappear with it. Use Sanny to decompile new scripts. If it's encrypted then don't use it. The scripts are often confusing at first, but with a little practice it doesn't usually take long to pick out potential issues.

 

Sanny makes it really easy for beginners to screw up saves in thousands of ways; I can't possibly hunt down everything. Unfortunately, most of the damage is caused by the same basic mistakes. Mistakes that are addressed very clearly in every cleo guide everywhere. Don't mess with global variables, pickups, cargens, icons, and objects unless you have a very clear understanding on how your modifications will affect the complete progression of the game.

 

Ok I downloaded this savegame editor and it looks like an excellent tool for SA modding. Loving it so far. However, I don't know what you touch to remove the saved blips, so I have not touched anything to do with globals, pickups and variables.

 

Can you point me out what to do in the most simplest form ? I'm still very new to all thos, cheers bro !

[OrionSR]

SASE will only help a little. It can view certain things easily, but can't be used directly to remove unwanted items.

 

Cargens: It's easy to see if car generators are being added to your save. A normal save will have 208 cargens. This doesn't change during normal play. Vehicles that are unlocked during the game were created at the start and displayed or hidden as missions are completed. The Rustler at the airstrip is listed first, and the forklift at Angel Pine is last. If you've got more cargens than that there may be a problem. Adding a car isn't usually a problem. Adding the same cars again and again is the primary concern.

 

If you want to get creative with cargens there should be no trouble adding 120 or more to a standard save. There's room for 500 total, but you need to leave a lot of room for streamed cargens to be loaded as needed as CJ moves about the map.

 

SASE can't remove cargens. SASE's data can be used indirectly to remove cargens, but it's not an easy process. The cargen's index field is the slot where this vehicle will be located in memory. The index can be used as a handle to remove cargens, but the game doesn't have a built in Delete_Cargen command. I've got a cleo routine around here somewhere that can do the job with memory writes. Try searching for "unallocate" cargens or vehicles.

 

Objects: There are about 72 "scm" objects in a standard save. This varies by +/- 2 as the game progresses (details). My custom CG saves are very stable with 12 added objects, but earlier saves with about two dozen extra object tended to crash for some people a little more often than I was comfortable with. The stability issue applies to PC saves, btw. Mobile saves tend to get glitched with a hundred or more extra objects without any issues with stability.

 

SASE has an option to remove objects. IIRC, it's actually cuts the object out of the save, a rather brutal edit. I usually just tweak the flags and let the game throw away the unneeded objects from a save when it's loaded. However, SASE seems to make all object edits appropriately. The warning about crashes caused by deleting objects should be heeded. When many of the standard objects are removed the scripts that use them will crash when they aren't found.

 

I don't edit with SASE unless I'm just running a quick test I plan to implement more carefully later. It has some odd quirks, like turning on the cheat flag and unexpected clothing, so I don't trust it on my good saves. I usually use a hex editor, but learning to hex edit just to keep an eye out for bad cleo scripts is a bit extreme.

 

Pools: Things get dramatically more complex with pools. For cargens and objects the game is only saving "scm" created items along with the slot index for putting them back in the right slot when loading. The game saves the entire pool for pickups and blips. Pools are very dynamic structures were items added and removed as needed without completely cleaning up all data in the record. Sometimes you'll be looking at deleted records that are ready for reuse. Pickups in particular, tend to expire but persist until activated long enough to check their timers.

 

Pickups: 620 max items, and all but a few dozen are used on a brand new game. The pickup pools rapidly fill up with dropped money and weapons from dead peds and new pickups added by the game. If CJ doesn't start collecting oysters. snapshots and horseshoes to free up some extra space in the pool the pickups tend to get bogged down by gang wars. Targets drop money and weapons in smaller piles or not at all. The armor CJ is camping might disappear right in front of him as he opens fire on the next wave and they start to drop weapons. It's a good idea to revisit areas of high drop activity to give the game a chance to collect the garbage of expired pickups - and get on those collectibles early.

 

So with that in mind, good luck making sense of the pickup pool in an old save. With practice you can get a good feel for the pool and track down the scattered pickups - the map helps. SASE doesn't have a delete button. Setting the Used and Collected flags might remove the pickup if CJ goes to look at it, but I doubt it. One strategy to remove added pickups is to use the ID field as a handle with a destroy pickup command in a custom cleo script designed to clean up your save.

 

Blips: Almost the same thing as pickups but you can't look at it with SASE. Only 175 records in the pool, and blips don't have timer issues, and don't need to be activated by proximity before they can do something. And... if you've got the 010 Editor I can share my template for viewing blips. Or you can try hunting through the save with a free editor like HxD using the available save documentation as a map of the structures. The blip info is a bit out of date; when you get through the rest of the save to the details of the blip structure see this topic for blips.

 

Global Variables: SASE's Script table has a table for global variables on the left. If you want to know what these values mean you'll need to study the scripts, but there are references for many common global variables. Global variables are shared by all scripts. It's hard to save any script settings without using global variables. And it's really easy to makeup custom names for global variable, so they are always tempting to use.

 

What you are looking for in SASE are unexpected changes to unnamed global variable, as these are the first used by Sanny when variable names are invented with out declaring them in customvariable.ini. View this file to see what's named or not. Most are named early on. $4 has something to do with the gymbikes, I think. Decompile main.scm with Sanny and search for $4 and try to make a kinda guess on what it might be used for. I'm expecting this value to be 0 until a gymbike is used, and then a float? Anything else is a hint of problems.

 

It's hard to go through the scripts one variable a time and make guesses to expected values. However, coders that use global variables tend to use them for similar purposes. Once you have a feel for the basic pattern of unnamed variables it's not too hard to notice that they all have similar, often incrementing values. SASE can reset globals properly, you'll need to dig up the proper setting somewhere else. BTW, the first few globals can be stomped on without apparent damage, but if enough custom variables are used then eventually flow control variables for later missions get corrupted. Issues can go undetected for quite a while.

 

In general, there's not a lot you can do to fix these sorts of problems with SASE, but it's one of the few tools to allow players to view critical information. Knowing what to do with that information is still more of an art that a science.

 

A more practical approach to protecting yourself from bad cleos is to decompile everything you use and examine the script for these issues. If globals decompile with names like $Player_Actor then they are probably used correctly. If you start to see globals like $4 and $5 then you can figure that those were probably called something like $MyCar1 and $MyCar2 in the original script.

 

Read the tutorials that describe how to add items to the save safely and don't use scripts that don't follow the rules, or pass a practical test if they've got a creative strategy. Cargens are usually a bad idea. A better script would detect when CJ is near and spawn the car only when needed using car creation codes instead of a cargen. There are fancy tricks for making cargens that don't save. Thread saving can be used to prevent scripts from duplicating required items.

 

In the end, you need to be a savvy consumer if you want to use a lot of mods safely. But in my opinion that's part of the fun, not a burden.

[Official General]

Ah f*ck it......I just uninstalled the game and deleted it to install a whole new game. From now on I will choose my mods very carefully and install them piecemeal. The cargen mods I believe was higher traffic and ped density, but the cities feel much more alive with these mods.