A Question about traffic

[MK9]

I got a question for you Volition guys.
Have you ever run into the issue where you find a rare vehicle and then nearly all of the cars in the street spawn in the same type?
It's similar to GTA4's taxi glitch where your modded car will make all traffic the same vehicle.
This was a nuisance in GTA4 and I wonder what is your thoughts to this type of thing.

 

[[V] Ramius]

This is related to the memory constraints that SR has to work under. We only have enough memory to load a small number of different vehicles at any one time and then we try to populate the city with as much variety (colors/options) as we can using those vehicles. That means that when we have a vehicle loaded (because random spawning wanted it/because the player is driving it around/parking spots are using it/scripting has it loaded) we try to get as much bang for our buck as possible. That usually means that if we load a "rare" vehicle, you'll probably see a couple of them so that there are a decent number of cars on the roads. We try our best not to have the roads/sidewalks look like you're moving through a ghost town.

 

[[V] HarlequiNQB]

Further to this (although it may or may not be relevant), on SR3/4 the above doesn't apply to any vehicle the player has customized (and may not apply to those they've grabbed from a garage or had a homie deliver - I'm less sure about where those are stored).

Basically, all SR's have a set of vehicle 'slots' which vehicles can be streamed into and out of. The game can only display ambient vehicles that are currently resident in a slot. SR1 and SR2 had a bunch of slots that were all the same size and were pretty much interchangeable, but SR3 and 4 have more generic slots, and two special slots. The two large slots are reserved for the player's customized vehicles (or one for each player's in co-op), and as a result these are distinct from the slots the game can use for spawning ambient vehicles (customized vehicles are bigger than ambient ones, hence the change - it lets us have more vehicles loaded at one time than we did in the first two games where all vehicles were considered 'customizable').

This is why the variety of vehicles in the world drops drastically when the player achieves notoriety - the game needs to fill the slots with notoriety vehicles, reducing the number of available for ambiance accordingly.