Some tips and tricks to tuning the game world

Star's tips and tricks

1. Physical changes to the world.

    San Andreas seems to me like a mixture of California and Florida. It's a satirical world, so it can be as outlandish as you'd like; to make it realistic, one should take that into consideration. There's a great mixture of enormous wealth and terrible poverty and an awful lot of violence. Use that to make additions that are both realistic and outrageous as you see fit.

• Try to only add new things instead of change them (unless you change them really good-like.). Find places where space WOULD be used by a city that's desperate for space. 
• Try not to add too many objects to a particular location. The game doesn't handle memory very well, as you all know, and we want the most memory reserved for our cars and pedestrians.

2. Balancing the spawning and technical data of vehicles.

    A lot of the community (And some of the devs, apparently) do not understand the underlaying mechanics of the game, so a lot of vehicles are not only tuned badly, but also implemented inconsistently.

Make sure to pay close attention to how vehicle.meta handles:

• identicalModelSpawnDistance
• maxNumOfSameColor
• frequency value
• swankness (controls PED reactions - maybe more)
• maxNum value

All of these values control how often the car spawns (when its all hooked up. Ask your dad.) Many mods do not actually tune these values. You wouldn't necessarily want a parking lot FULL of Blue Lambo Countaches, would you?

3. Handling files and you

It's said that vehicle mass actually impacts nothing except vehicle collision, but you still want to ensure that the key values of the handling file for every vehicle you add account for the following key things:

Info from https://gtamods.com/wiki/Handling.meta
 

• fMass
• fDriveBiasFront
• nInitialDriveGears
• fInitialDriveForce
• fDriveInertia
• fInitialDriveMaxFlatVel
• fBrakeForce
• fBrakeBiasFront

These are the important values that determine the car's transmission, speed, and braking. For more, read the link or ask your dad. 

Every single vehicle should be balanced relative to the vanilla vehicles with special attention to realistic speeds. 20MPH in GTAV does NOT feel like 20MPH in real life, and that scale needs to make sense IN THE GAME first. Keep that issue in mind.

4. Carvariations and You

In the case where you're seeing too many cars spawn under the same color, learn to introduce some variety by doing something as simple as adding to the range of colors a can can spawn with. There's a color guide out there, so use it! Many cars simply don't have many color items in <Colors>. So add more! 

<colors>
  <!-- JUST ADD MORE OF THESE BUT WITH DIFFERENT NUMBERS -->
        <Item>
          <indices content="char_array">
            30 <!-- The primary color of the vehicle -->
            30 
            32
            156 
          </indices>
          <liveries/>
        </Item>
<colors>

5. Popgroups and You.

popgroups.ymt is a xml-based data file that controls what cars spawn in the game world. Each and every one of these vehicles needs to be correctly hooked up to the game in order to function. (Ask your dad.) The game (likely) goes down the list and rolls dice based upon the values in each vehicle's vehicles.meta. If it succeeds, it spawns. 

Remember to keep a backup of this file.

I hope some of those help! Have fun!

Edited July 19, 20196 yr by Starsickle
clarity