SRTT Vehicle Variant Spawning

[Gondar]

I was wondering, having tried a little poking... how is the variant weights for spawning random vehicles handled? I mean, we can't edit that part yet being compiled into the car binaries, but looking at the text versions packed away the weighting seems to be a value up to 100.. but I can't see any reason you can't have it add to more than 100 (and for the parts too). It says it's recommended you make it add to 100 so they can be percentages, but what happens when you do exceed that? Does it use the weightings as relatives of the total (so two 100s are really 50% each?) Or does it just throw an exception? Or does it just go first one it finds with 100 weighting and never realize there's more variants? Or is it just using a random number and when it gets a hit it uses it but the actual max is something like 65536 because the spawning loop hits all the cars possible?

For that matter, is the variant weighting code still active, or is this leftover that was removed to strip down heavy real-time load lag? Because, I can only think of seeing the "Standard" predefined loadout on the roads before in traffic, and we know Saints members also only spawn in that (not in cutscenes or when called by a mission/phone, but in normal traffic).
Even though the gang customization screen seems hardcoded to assume a "Saints" variant exists for the car (though I haven't tried forcing different cars via hex editing the save) when it loads them in traffic it's using the generic weighting resulting in some people missing the fact they're there tooling about (it does mark them on the minimap at least)

I'm asking because when we do get ahold of the data for tweaking those tables, being able to figure just how they're working (if?) will save headache and help figure why it might not be doing what we expect.

 

[Haganu]

Old thread, haven't seen a reply, but hypothetically, it's the first one. I've exceeded the 100 "percentage" values and percentchances quite some times and never crashed.

 

[[V] Knobby]

It will use the weightings relative to the total, but it is just easier to think of it as a percentage and make them add up to 100.

As for changing this, the tools are out there to crunch cvtf files, so you can do this now.

 

[Haganu]

Wanted to create a new thread for this: but it might fit well in here:
What happened with all the variety in car variants? I know there are some variants for cars tuning them up a little, but why aren't they added in the vanilla game? Is it memory issues (unlikely) ? Time issues? Sure we can mod it in, but I'm just wondering why the tuned up variants haven't been there in the vanilla game. Nothing complaining, really. Just wondering.

 

[[V] Knobby]

Vehicle variants changed in SR3. In SR2, every vehicle on the road had all the customization parts stuck on it all the time. We just hid what we didn't want to show. This made for super easy altering of the vehicles at spawn time to change them around a bit. It also made every vehicle super-super expensive. We wanted to increase the vehicle density for SR3 so we decided to try and make the ped vehicles cheaper. The way we did it was to make the vehicle a single mesh instead of lots of parts. We could still get the parts we wanted with vehicle customization by having an expensive player-only version called the fully customizable vehicle. When you go to rim jobs, we swap out the ped vehicle for the fully customizable one. In theory we could still have different versions the peds drove around in, but each one would cost the same as a different vehicle.

Interestingly, we kept most of the same crunch pipeline and left the variant word around and stuff so things are complicated. I do wish we made more variants of each vehicle so you would see some of that going around in the world, but it seems that art decided to go with as many unique vehicles as possible. You could create and add more vehicles and they would go into the ped population, but you won't see more of a variant of the vehicle just because you have the base version loaded since it isn't a savings in memory to do that any longer.

 

[Haganu]

Vehicle variants changed in SR3. In SR2, every vehicle on the road had all the customization parts stuck on it all the time. We just hid what we didn't want to show. This made for super easy altering of the vehicles at spawn time to change them around a bit. It also made every vehicle super-super expensive. We wanted to increase the vehicle density for SR3 so we decided to try and make the ped vehicles cheaper. The way we did it was to make the vehicle a single mesh instead of lots of parts. We could still get the parts we wanted with vehicle customization by having an expensive player-only version called the fully customizable vehicle. When you go to rim jobs, we swap out the ped vehicle for the fully customizable one. In theory we could still have different versions the peds drove around in, but each one would cost the same as a different vehicle.

Interestingly, we kept most of the same crunch pipeline and left the variant word around and stuff so things are complicated. I do wish we made more variants of each vehicle so you would see some of that going around in the world, but it seems that art decided to go with as many unique vehicles as possible. You could create and add more vehicles and they would go into the ped population, but you won't see more of a variant of the vehicle just because you have the base version loaded since it isn't a savings in memory to do that any longer.

Thank you for this clear reply. But I think it's quite a pity to only have super cheap standard variants, just because that saves memory. Good content and high quality games don't only go through lots of weapons, lots of clothing or high graphics, at least, that's my opinion... The small things also count, like seeing an awesome car spawn once in a while, or like what you did in SRIV with the lights.
Ah well, I'm glad the variant structure is still there, I'm glad to be able to make new variants (if I finally get the tool to work right T_T).

Also, one thing that wonders me yet. In the variant list of the Blade (car_2dr_exoticsports10) I found this variant name "rollers". It's about the only rollers thing I have seen in the game, but I wonder: is there any small, miniscule chance of the rollers making an appearance in SRIV? Would be awesome.

 

[Dhruv]

Vehicle variants changed in SR3. In SR2, every vehicle on the road had all the customization parts stuck on it all the time. We just hid what we didn't want to show. This made for super easy altering of the vehicles at spawn time to change them around a bit. It also made every vehicle super-super expensive. We wanted to increase the vehicle density for SR3 so we decided to try and make the ped vehicles cheaper. The way we did it was to make the vehicle a single mesh instead of lots of parts. We could still get the parts we wanted with vehicle customization by having an expensive player-only version called the fully customizable vehicle. When you go to rim jobs, we swap out the ped vehicle for the fully customizable one. In theory we could still have different versions the peds drove around in, but each one would cost the same as a different vehicle.

Interestingly, we kept most of the same crunch pipeline and left the variant word around and stuff so things are complicated. I do wish we made more variants of each vehicle so you would see some of that going around in the world, but it seems that art decided to go with as many unique vehicles as possible. You could create and add more vehicles and they would go into the ped population, but you won't see more of a variant of the vehicle just because you have the base version loaded since it isn't a savings in memory to do that any longer.

I didn't play Saints Row 2 after the first campaign completion, but its surprising you guys let the vehicles drive around with all extras stuck onto them, just hid through vids or whatever. This means that the extra accessories were cosmetic only? And I thought the compensator was tougher with the wraparound rambar on. Damn!

I would like to ask a topic-pertaining question here: The criminal in Saints Row The Third did not get a rear bed cabin mod unlike other trucks. Is it because Oleg rides on it? And ONLY on it? Because, yeah, we discovered contradictory to Volition's Principal Technical Artist, he is picky about his pickups (no pun intended).

 

[[V] Knobby]

Thank you for this clear reply. But I think it's quite a pity to only have super cheap standard variants, just because that saves memory. Good content and high quality games don't only go through lots of weapons, lots of clothing or high graphics, at least, that's my opinion... The small things also count, like seeing an awesome car spawn once in a while, or like what you did in SRIV with the lights.)

Cheaper and lighter doesn't mean boring. The vehicle could be anything the artists and designers wanted to make as long as it fit in memory, which was much easier to do without all the customization options weighing it down. This didn't boil down to a technical limitation. We went from a really limiting(8?) number of vehicle slots to 17 slots. Each of these slots is 2 megs in size.

James can probably speak to the vehicle variation and if that was a design decision or a time thing or what. He can also tell us if I am lying about it being easier to fit things into slots.

 

[[V] Knobby]

I didn't play Saints Row 2 after the first campaign completion, but its surprising you guys let the vehicles drive around with all extras stuck onto them, just hid through vids or whatever. This means that the extra accessories were cosmetic only? And I thought the compensator was tougher with the wraparound rambar on. Damn!

Just because the vehicle had all the cosmetic things on it doesn't mean the upgrades did nothing. When we display things we can alter the vehicle handling, strength, etc. I'm not sure if this actually happened in this case, but it doesn't prevent it.

I would like to ask a topic-pertaining question here: The criminal in Saints Row The Third did not get a rear bed cabin mod unlike other trucks. Is it because Oleg rides on it? And ONLY on it? Because, yeah, we discovered contradictory to Volition's Principal Technical Artist, he is picky about his pickups (no pun intended).

Unfortunately I can't answer this question. I think MattG did the Oleg on vehicles thing. Maybe he can help here.

 

[Dhruv]

A'right, thats cool, Knobby. Thanks btw.