Really not possible to replace all cars?

[rusty_browns_ring_donuts]

Hello!

 

After playing GTA on console since San Andreas, I've never modded any cars into GTA since Vice City.

But I own GTA V on three consoles and on PC, so I thought, maybe, I can make it interesting for me again by replacing the "fake" GTA cars with real life counterparts.

 

But the more I read about it, the more it sounds like I cannot really replace all the cars in the city with modded cars, the approach is more like "I install many cars, but only I drive them - the traffic still consists of vanilla cars".

If I would replace all traffic cars, the performance of the game would be so terrible, that it isn't really playable anymore.

 

Is that really the case? How do you handle modded cars?

 

I know, that in Vice City, I really replaced at least 80 % of all cars with modded ones.

[LeeC22]

2 hours ago, rusty_browns_ring_donuts said:

Is that really the case? How do you handle modded cars?

 

The majority of modded cars are ripped from other games. The problem is those other games are usually racing games and the cars are much higher detail levels than GTAV cars. Especially if it's a Forzavista car model. Because a lot of car modders aren't actually 3D modelers, they only use the highest level of detail model because they don't know how to optimise a model to create LODs... or they just can't be bothered in a lot of cases. What that means is that instead of a GTAV car that has around 100,000 polys for max detail and several LOD models going down to just a few thousand polys, you get a car with sometimes over 500,000 polys and that's as small as it gets. I have seen addon cars with over 1 million polygons in the past.

 

If there is only one of those cars in the world and you're driving it, then it's not so bad. If you put those cars into traffic, when you get into a packed area of the city where there can be in excess of 140 vehicles in the world, you've got a problem because even the cars in the distance will be those same 500,000 poly versions. On top of that will be the excessive texture usage because everything will be 2K or higher because that doesn't matter in a racing game, especially when the racing game is using the proper LOD models as well.

 

The end result is the game is suddenly forced to use a massive overhead of model and texture data which will typically cause parts of the map to stop rendering, or worst case it will just crash the game. One modded car could be as resource heavy as ten GTAV cars, so instead of the game using resouces for 140 GTAV cars, it's using the resources for the equivalent of 1400 GTAV cars.

 

However... there are some modders who know what they are doing with car models. There are some modders who are creating cars from scratch instead of just ripping them from other games. Those are the ones who are creating models that work far better with the game, because they are better optimised. Look for cars that have "LODs" in the title or description. Check the models in OpenIV to see if the LODs are properly reduced versions and not just the high-res model with a different filename. The better-built the model, the more stable the game.

 

Beware of things like this... this is a model that has "LODs" in the title... this is not how you do LODs for a model.

 

https://postimg.cc/d7b7QjG0

 

The only way you can tell is by checking the model details before installing it. Open the yft files in OpenIV and look at the poly count. Click the Level of Detail option and see if it has more options than just "High". Compare the ytd size with a GTAV car to see how much extra memory the textures are going to be using. The more selective you are with the model quality, the more chance you have of replacing more of the normal cars in the game.

 

Mods like this are the ideal type... https://www.gta5-mods.com/vehicles/citroen-ds-break-add-on-replace-lods

 

The high-res version has a lot of polygons but the LOD models are well done and massively reduce the poly-count whilst keeping the model still looking like the same car.

Edited September 12 by LeeC22

[rusty_browns_ring_donuts]

@leec22

Thank you very much for your detailed answer - this is a good way to work with it