SR2 Changing the Draw Distance

etayorius said:
Just wanted to confirm the "Distant View" in Option does work at least, in a very non efficient and unrealistic way for a 2009 PC Title.
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Isn't that about the time the Xbox 360 came out? Fancy that. :-P

Our spawning system is pretty serious about killing people outside of view in order to populate what you can see. Hopefully we can get some ini or sliders setup for this.
 
Sorry... I did not meant it that way, i just find it kinda wacky that in SR2 NPC and Vehicles spawn infront of you and they also disappear just when you turn around and look back to where they were standing, for Xbox360 and PS3 i think it`s a must... for a PC title not so much.

The Xbox360 came out in 2006 right? Even TES4 Oblivion had a Distant View Slider in PC, even Morrowind had one back in the day for PC too hehe...

Oh and you don´t have to promise anything you can´t really implement this far on release... it`s 2013 and i understand completely that you guys (Volition) got your hands full with SR4 and SR3 Modding Tools, you guys already do TONS of awesome stuff for the Saints Row community.

But it just makes us get our hopes up only to be crushed when this does not becomes a reality, Unless... you guys actually intend to do it? anyway i do seriously understand the situation, SR2 was released in 2009... to make it worst it was not even ported to PC by your hands (Volition).

Perhaps you meant the other SR3 Draw Distance Thread? hehe if so, it`s cool anyway... SR3 also needs a slider for the Draw Distance.
 
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The problem is that they didn't do the PC port. It's come up before that they don't exactly have the code for a lot of the weird stuff that was done.. and likely changing the distance would be the sort of thing you'd need source for, to build it into a new patch for the main game exe.

Admittedly, Games like Morrowind that were developed on PC and later ported have assorted graphics detail sliders, and draw distance is one. Important thing to realize though is if memory serves there's STILL a limit in how far away the game will actually process stuff, like NPCs etc. Even at max, it's a lot less distance than the landscape. That's what we're up against here, it's not just rendering far terrain, but it's doing all the stuff that happens to be on said far terrain. San Andreas is a good example of that I can think of... with the distance up enough, you can actually see the peds/cars suddenly fade into view as they're pulled up, and the game starts to REALLY aggressively cull the ones not seen. Remember, every single vehicle and pedestrian and so on actually does stuff beyond being rendered. Times have changed and we hit the 64-bit era removing a lot of those memory limits, we have CPUs that make the older ones look like calculators.. but the programs from half a decade ago had to make do with that stuff, so they have their own implied maximums.

A patch for a game that old though isn't unheard of.. usually it's a fan made thing though with some loader to inject some code, but it can be spliced in.. remove a few of those assumptions and let the game happily run wild, perhaps add a bubble of persistence time around the player(s) to go with the populating the view, so people don't vanish the moment you look away unless they're a fair distance away and thus not about to go smack you upside the head with a baseball bat, and even then you can look away and look back to double check and they're still there unless it's been a lot longer or the player is running away...
 
The other problem is that, if I'm somehow right, CD Projekt (The ones who did the PC port of SR2) aren't contacting Volition, or maybe they are but even they don't have the source code, so this is just great, I can't believe CD Projekt would just port the game to PC, fuck it up with a lot of bugs and leave it like that. Yeah, they made patches, SOME patches, and only Steam has the latest patch while the rest have a buggy one.

Can't the community make the distant view slider themselves though? I remember GTASA had lots of mods for that, I know it's a different game but, GTASA didn't have any official SDK or modding tools, right?
 
Strogglet said:
The other problem is that, if I'm somehow right, CD Projekt (The ones who did the PC port of SR2) aren't contacting Volition, or maybe they are but even they don't have the source code, so this is just great, I can't believe CD Projekt would just port the game to PC, fuck it up with a lot of bugs and leave it like that. Yeah, they made patches, SOME patches, and only Steam has the latest patch while the rest have a buggy one.

Can't the community make the distant view slider themselves though? I remember GTASA had lots of mods for that, I know it's a different game but, GTASA didn't have any official SDK or modding tools, right?
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CD Projekt gets a bad rap from SR2 PC. Yes, it was poorly made and was buggy, but I'm pretty sure it was made on an absolute shoestring budget. They couldn't have devoted many resources to the title and as a result you get exactly what THQ seemed to want. A reasonable PC port to say they have one.

If you want to put on your tin foil hat you could say that it was done to push people to buy the console version where piracy isn't as big of an issue.
 
Are you saying THQ was the one who made CD Projekt do SR2 PC, and with a very bad budget?

That makes me wonder of why they did on them instead of you (Obviously with a reasonable budget that is needed), Volition.

I bet they did this because the Illuminati told them to *puts dunce hat instead of tin foil hat*
 
CD Projekt is one of the nicest Devs out there, their members still update Witcher2 on their own much like SR Devs do, and they seem to be on the right side of customers most of the time. I do believe THQ just wanted a PC port with the minimum Budget for bragging rights on PC.

THQ should had allowed at least 1 more update to address the Popup Draw Distance and the horrible performance issues, the game performs horrible even on my PhenomII x4 980 OCed to 4.0Ghz with a GTX470 (20% OC) i really did not had as much issues with CTDs as i did with Skyrim though.

If i could had 3 wishes regarding SR2 it would be the following:

* Increase the performance of SR2 by at least another 20%

* Add a Draw Distance Slider

* SR2 DLCs on PC.

I also do not see the Fan Base Community building upon any of them either.

Guess this wraps up the whole thread, at least i hope someone is able to bring Stilwater into SR3 or SR4 with also some Activities from SR2 when ever the Modding tools gets released by Volition,
 
I would like to see a Draw Distance Slider for Saints Row The Third as well, if possible. Sometimes it is pretty hard to dodge a police car that spawns barely 50 metres in front of you while driving at high speed.

Since SR TT wasn't ported by some other company I'm sure it will be easier for this game and SR IV then for the second game.
 
CD Projekt probably did the best they could, but it wasn't just a shoestring budget. Considering Volition wasn't even told there was gonna be a PC port until it was already pretty much done, it's very likely that THQ suddenly decided "Oh, we should release for PC as well, get that market" and tossed the game over... and it was probably a few months, tops, before release. I imagine some executive figured "well the content is already done, so it should be quick and easy" instead of realizing that it turns out porting a game to another platform means new bugs to fix and new bits to do. Hence it's slow, buggy, and a poor port. The game underneath is still SR2, but I imagine they didn't have much to any time to really bug-test anything but critical game-crashing bugs.

GTA:SA however had years and years of dedicated hackers at it, eventually going from a trainer to code injection to full out dll replacements to hijack the engine for their own goals (leading to MultiTheft Auto, which unless things changed uses no actual SA source!) To do the same for SR2 is possible, but Volition probably won't be able to help too much with a lot of what the engine is doing (not having made said PC port and not sure how stuff was changed). I'd still love to see it.. speed fix dlls are nice but we need to start pushing the game to do more than it allows... and Steam or not it can be done (as evidenced by all sorts of hooks and trainers and such for Steamworks games)
 
Volition not knowing CD Projekt were going to make a PC Port for SR2 sounds way too unethical. That's like this guy invented something, but then it is being remade without his permission and knowledge, yet he himself states it might be dangerous. Kind of like Tesla, but I could be talking about other "legalities".

What has Steam to do with it? You're referencing to how it is more difficult to mod GTA games if they're on steam?

Thing is, and I'm sure a lot would agree, that if the SDK for SR2 will be released, there should be a best-as-possible fix for all the bugs in SR2, as in performance, other crashes and so on. People should wait for the overhauls, big mods and so on until the fixes can be made.
 
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