[GT-1]

Err... next stop Myriad. Although there seems to be plenty of other things to figure out yet.

[aad]

Im sure myriad will be the first total conversion for gta sa all the people working on Myriad already know a lot of things and im sure steve-m already discovered a lot of secrets like formats and colfile stuff hopefully some stuff will get released soon. and amazing screen btw GT-1.

[Opius]

QUOTE (ashdexx @ Jun 24 2005, 07:21)

Delfi and GT-1 speak the truth. aside from some uber-weird effects while the loading screen progresses, it works. funky audio from the hydra as well, no engine sounds. but thats a bug i've been getting anyway even during normal gameplay.

EXACT same symptoms, except my sound works normally on an unstripped install.

I also found another interesting, probably memory related problem.

For sh*ts and giggles, I drove my Hydra directly down into the water, killing myself. When I respawned, there were these strange lines off the distance. Whenever I looked at their origin, the game crashed. Brought up the contrast since you couldn't really see them in the original.

[illspirit]

Hmmmm... I don't get it. The game didn't work for me if we leave the rest of the generic ide's and levelxre.ide in. And we kinda need that stuff if we're to add, well, anything. Procobj.ide is needed for col's to have plants on them, and vegepart.ide is needed for any trees. Multiobj.ide has stuff like beach towels that spawn with peds in beach areas. And levelxre.ide has like all the stuff for mini games.

[ThAtSgOtTaHuRt]

If you have ever played the mission where you fly out to Liberty City - you will clearly see there is almost an UNLIMITED amount of space within the surrounding ocean. Even not during that mission; I have started flying out to sea and stayed in a strait line for over 5 minutes without hitting the edge of the world. At first I thought maybe you actually hit the edge of the map and they somehow replay the water, sky, and cloud textures\objects on a loop. But amazingly I turned around and it took EXACTLY the same amount of time to fly back - proving that all five minutes of flying I was actually flying over NEW land\sea - not just a loop. A simple test would be to place an object WAY outside main-land SA and fly to that object - to actually see if it is true. If you can modify IPL and IDE limits that SA will allow. (like the VCLimitAdjuster did with VC) without it crashing - you may be able to keep SA while adding myriad (or other maps). The space is there but having too many objects is the only problem.

This post has been edited by ThAtSgOtTaHuRt on Friday, Jun 24 2005, 16:44

[Fro]

QUOTE (ThAtSgOtTaHuRt @ Jun 24 2005, 15:05)

If you have ever played the mission where you fly out to Liberty City - you will clearly see there is almost an UNLIMITED amount of space within the surrounding ocean. Even not during that mission; I have started flying out to sea and stayed in a strait line for over 5 minutes without hitting the edge of the world. At first I thought maybe you actually hit the edge of the map and they somehow replay the water, sky, and cloud textures\objects on a loop. But amazingly I turned around and it took EXACTLY the same amount of time to fly back - proving that all five minutes of flying I was actually flying over NEW land\sea - not just a loop. A simple test would be to place an object WAY outside main-land SA and fly to that object - to actually see if it is true. If you can modify IPL and IDE limits that SA will allow. (like the VCLimitAdjuster did with VC) without it crashing - you may be able to keep SA while adding myriad (or other maps). The space is there but having too many objects is the only problem.

Makes sense, and seems probable.

[burpicane]

QUOTE (ThAtSgOtTaHuRt @ Jun 24 2005, 15:05)

If you have ever played the mission where you fly out to Liberty City - you will clearly see there is almost an UNLIMITED amount of space within the surrounding ocean. Even not during that mission; I have started flying out to sea and stayed in a strait line for over 5 minutes without hitting the edge of the world. At first I thought maybe you actually hit the edge of the map and they somehow replay the water, sky, and cloud textures\objects on a loop. But amazingly I turned around and it took EXACTLY the same amount of time to fly back - proving that all five minutes of flying I was actually flying over NEW land\sea - not just a loop. A simple test would be to place an object WAY outside main-land SA and fly to that object - to actually see if it is true. If you can modify IPL and IDE limits that SA will allow. (like the VCLimitAdjuster did with VC) without it crashing - you may be able to keep SA while adding myriad (or other maps). The space is there but having too many objects is the only problem.

tools like vc limit adjuster are much more harder to make because sa has securom 7 protection

[illspirit]

The problem with adding another city to San An isn't physical, or, ummm, virtual space. In theory, objects can be placed as far away as there are 32bit integers large enough to store the location with. The real problem is there's only so much memory for storing the object definitions and locations. I'm not sure just how it works, but there looks like the game can only handle 256 ipl's, and within those, there's only so many items that can be in any given area.

[DexX]

QUOTE (illspirit @ Jun 24 2005, 07:24)

Hmmmm... I don't get it. The game didn't work for me if we leave the rest of the generic ide's and levelxre.ide in. And we kinda need that stuff if we're to add, well, anything. Procobj.ide is needed for col's to have plants on them, and vegepart.ide is needed for any trees. Multiobj.ide has stuff like beach towels that spawn with peds in beach areas. And levelxre.ide has like all the stuff for mini games.

working off the stripped installation, i added these lines back into my gta.dat and it still loaded (with the same graphical glitches as before)..

CODE

IDE DATA\MAPS\generic\vegepart.IDE IDE DATA\MAPS\generic\multiobj.IDE IDE DATA\MAPS\generic\procobj.IDE

so they arent a problem.

i also added these lines...

CODE

IDE DATA\MAPS\leveldes\levelmap.IDE IDE DATA\MAPS\leveldes\levelxre.IDE

and the game still loads fine. even if i comment out teh levelmap.IDE, it loads ok

[ThAtSgOtTaHuRt]

as I said:

QUOTE

If you can modify IPL and IDE limits that SA will allow. (like the VCLimitAdjuster did with VC) without it crashing - you may be able to keep SA while adding myriad (or other maps). The space is there but having too many objects is the only problem.

illspirit:

QUOTE

The problem with adding another city to San An isn't physical, or, ummm, virtual space. In theory, objects can be placed as far away as there are 32bit integers large enough to store the location with. The real problem is there's only so much memory for storing the object definitions and locations. I'm not sure just how it works, but there looks like the game can only handle 256 ipl's, and within those, there's only so many items that can be in any given area.

I totally didnt think of it as being a memory issue although you are 100% correct and only so much tweaking can be made. Well with Vice City you were able to increase the object instances (which are stated in IPL files) ALOT - adding a thousand+ more than original (at least I did). But the actuall objects (located in IDE files) could only be increased so much before having a problem. So having replecas (other instances - IPL) of SA's objects would be very easy to do - but actually adding in your own map objects (IDEs) would\may not be possible with the entirety of SA still there. I dont really know all the facts, so I will just have to wait and see what info develops and how far GTASA mapping can really go.

[dertyjerzian]

@Steve-M

Although this will be very awesome, especially because I have a much smaller than SA scale mod in mind that I am researching right now, I'm wondering something a little off topic here.

My question is this: Do you see a promise in modding the existing game? As in, developing it further? To build where there is much countryside and so forth? What are your feelings on this? Being explicit would be very much appreciated, bro. Thanks.

[illspirit]

This seems to work:

[steve-m]

not for me though...

QUOTE (Delfi @ Jun 24 2005, 00:14)

another vierd thing happened with my ide file - i did remove all paths but still seen one normal boat created ingame also are airport locations hard-coded?? because they are still in stripped version.

Yea, I noticed this too. There must be some boats that use the tracks*.dat files or whatever, no idea why.
Edit: illy just found out the paths are compiled somehow, maybe into nodes*.dat??

As for airports, no idea, probably hardcoded. At least I didn't find anything that might define them.

@dertyjerzian: Not without massively hacking it, I guess. Let me quote this R* guy again:

QUOTE (GameSpot's Q&A)

GS: With this new, streaming map, is there any limit to the size that the world map can be? What creates this limit if there is one? John Whyte: There are always limits! There are limits to the number of objects that can be in any section of the map, and this determines more than anything the density of objects in the game. Some of the city sections have effectively maxed out the game in its current form. If we wanted to increase the density of objects, then we would have to go back to the code and rewrite it to handle much larger numbers. (Technically speaking, there are a lot of structures in code that rely on 8-bit indexing to save space.)

So if there are limits per sections, you might be able to add additional objects in the countryside, but not in the cities. But we still have to find out a lot more about that, like what those sections are, and how exactly the LOD groups are assigned. Furthermore, water and seabed outside the 6000² map area are hardcoded, what would have to be disabled as well.

[Fro]

edited

This post has been edited by Fro on Sunday, Jun 26 2005, 07:18

[ThePengwin]

Hey there everyone

Im kinda new and i dont know too much but id like to help. Ive tried everything that other people have said and my game still keeps crashing. could someone show some kind of stepthrough on everything they did? id really like to make my own GTA i reckon it would be neat.

edit: im soo stoopid!
I didnt realise you had to mod the SA scenario. i got it working fine. i think i have an idea about those boats. they could have actually made it so that boats are randomly generated, like the cars, except where there is water. boats wernt all that usefull in SA and they probably put them in for eye candy. i might have a look into removing them.

This post has been edited by ThePengwin on Sunday, Jun 26 2005, 14:20

[steve-m]

QUOTE (ThePengwin @ Jun 26 2005, 16:09)

i think i have an idea about those boats. they could have actually made it so that boats are randomly generated, like the cars, except where there is water. boats wernt all that usefull in SA and they probably put them in for eye candy. i might have a look into removing them.

No there are also peds and cars on the empty map, although all the ipl files (with paths) were removed. Paths seem to be compiled into the nodes*.dat files, that are in the img. Removing the "dontbuildpaths" from stream.ini doesn't help, so we'd probably have to code our own path compiler.

[ThePengwin]

hmm thats a bummer

Neways now that the map is blank how do you remake a map? ivesearched the net and only found a map editor for GTA3 and VC. ive tried to trick it into taking San andreas maps but they arent showing up. is there a plain ordinary free IPL map file editor?

[RainingAcid]

So much for "modding support". What about the gta_quick.dat?

[steve-m]

QUOTE (RainingAcid @ Jun 26 2005, 17:05)

What about the gta_quick.dat?

Not used, and wouldn't work either.

[chaos1]

why are u trying to remove the map?