[V] HarlequiNQB
Volition Staff
Sorry, had a crazy gonzo month and haven't had a chance to check in until now.
Reducing the general amount of spawning of more awesome cars was a design/high level art decision as best as I'm aware. The idea being that if you saw an awesome car it was awesome for a reason, unlike SR 1 and 2 where vehicles could just be cool looking randomly. This went for car paints as well - cars in the world have paint that is less cool than you can buy in the shop, or that gang cars have. The intention was for gang cars or other game play related vehicles to stand out a lot more against the background traffic (and there was a lot more background traffic).
There's no reason that the cars couldn't be just as exciting as they were before, although it would be the case that a run of the mill Sedan and a suped-up version of the same would now take two vehicle slot rather than one. If you only had the suped-up one loaded then you'd see lots of that version of the car, and non of the run-of-the-mill one.
The memory constraints on each vehicle with this new system were kind of insane. It allowed for a lot more vehicles to be loaded at once and displayed at once, but not-counting the majority of textures and wheels (which were shared between the vehicles) each had to fit into 650k (I think, I could be off by ~50k). That's not a lot of room for variety, but we did get as much in as we could. We also had to fit the sum total of all possible variants into 3mb or so (again excluding the global vehicle textures, and wheels), to allow for the fully customizable player version of the vehicle.
So the lack of really varied random vehicles boiled down to a combination of art and design choices, two separate sets of memory limitations, and time constraints (since each variant had more setup time than they did previously, for various reasons).
Oleg was originally supposed to be able to ride in the back of any open bed truck, but eventually it was realized this could cause vehicle design/animation conflicts, so he was limited to just the one. I'm not sure if that was hard coded, or just a flag in a table though - if it's the latter he could technically ride on other things, if they were built to support him.
And yes, all the visible variants (with the exception of wheels spikes and wheels), were visual only, and had no impact on vehicle handling. Wheels did have an impact on handling, because the physics of the vehicle are based around the wheels, so changing the size of them does slightly change the handling. This was a gameplay decision - to separate the performance from the look as much as possible - so a player could have the vehicle look as they wanted and handle how they wanted, whereas if the look directly effected handling this would be impossible.
Reducing the general amount of spawning of more awesome cars was a design/high level art decision as best as I'm aware. The idea being that if you saw an awesome car it was awesome for a reason, unlike SR 1 and 2 where vehicles could just be cool looking randomly. This went for car paints as well - cars in the world have paint that is less cool than you can buy in the shop, or that gang cars have. The intention was for gang cars or other game play related vehicles to stand out a lot more against the background traffic (and there was a lot more background traffic).
There's no reason that the cars couldn't be just as exciting as they were before, although it would be the case that a run of the mill Sedan and a suped-up version of the same would now take two vehicle slot rather than one. If you only had the suped-up one loaded then you'd see lots of that version of the car, and non of the run-of-the-mill one.
The memory constraints on each vehicle with this new system were kind of insane. It allowed for a lot more vehicles to be loaded at once and displayed at once, but not-counting the majority of textures and wheels (which were shared between the vehicles) each had to fit into 650k (I think, I could be off by ~50k). That's not a lot of room for variety, but we did get as much in as we could. We also had to fit the sum total of all possible variants into 3mb or so (again excluding the global vehicle textures, and wheels), to allow for the fully customizable player version of the vehicle.
So the lack of really varied random vehicles boiled down to a combination of art and design choices, two separate sets of memory limitations, and time constraints (since each variant had more setup time than they did previously, for various reasons).
Oleg was originally supposed to be able to ride in the back of any open bed truck, but eventually it was realized this could cause vehicle design/animation conflicts, so he was limited to just the one. I'm not sure if that was hard coded, or just a flag in a table though - if it's the latter he could technically ride on other things, if they were built to support him.
And yes, all the visible variants (with the exception of wheels spikes and wheels), were visual only, and had no impact on vehicle handling. Wheels did have an impact on handling, because the physics of the vehicle are based around the wheels, so changing the size of them does slightly change the handling. This was a gameplay decision - to separate the performance from the look as much as possible - so a player could have the vehicle look as they wanted and handle how they wanted, whereas if the look directly effected handling this would be impossible.
