LSPDFR 0.2 - The Police Computer

This is the second part of our LSPDFR 0.2 preview series.  For more information about the background behind 0.2, check out the first installment in this series here: http://www.lcpdfr.com/forums/topic/51800-lspdfr-02-announcement-first-preview

I think by far the most hotly requested feature for the next version of LSPDFR was the resurrection of the police computer.  A vital tool for those of you that like to add some detail to your patrols - the police computer makes it return with a vengeance in 0.2.

The new Police Computer is capable of searching both license plates and subject names, and will actually perform a real search on every vehicle or person currently in the game.  If a match is found, it will then be returned to you via a notification after a slight delay.  In essence, this is a very real implementation of the system, and we hope that it will be more immersive than our offering in LCPDFR, which felt fake at times.

The brand new Police Computer featuring both license plate and subject record searches.

Of course, to achieve this sense of immersion, improving the Police Computer itself wasn't enough - we also took some time to boost the quality of the data that it relied on.  In early versions of LCPDFR, there were around 15 or so 'funny' names in the entire data pool.  In later versions, there were literally thousands of names, all able to be dynamically generated, which was far more realistic, but also gave some really weird results at times.  You might go as far as saying that it could feel as though everyone in Liberty City was named by a member of the British royal family or some crazy celebrity parent.  At first, we used this same system in the early implementation of the LSPDFR Police Computer, but it simply wasn't good enough and really let down the system as a whole considering the new functionality that was there.

For those of you unaware, we were deeply involved in San Andreas Multiplayer (SA-MP - a multiplayer mod for GTA: SA) in 2012.  As part of this, we ran a server titled Fort Carson Roleplay (FCRP), which was essentially a simulation of a small American town, where players could register on the server, make fictional characters and then spawn in the world to do any number of things like run a business, join a gang, be a cop, etc.  FCRP quickly became one of the top 175 servers in SA-MP and had something like 12,000 registered accounts.  Of course, long after its closure at the end of 2012, the masses of character data from FCRP were simply sitting on an old hard drive, collecting dust.  Just a few weeks ago, I moved the data back over and thought that it would be nice to actually do something with it, and the development of the new Police Computer for LSPDFR seemed like the perfect opportunity.  Indeed, LSPDFR now uses persona data from just under 3,000 FCRP player characters.  We took it a little further than merely importing the names as well, with some other attributes from the server being recognised (making for some interesting easter eggs).  The key advantage of this system, though, is that we have close to 3,000 names which were actually made up by close to 3,000 real people.  Hopefully this makes things feel more natural, and will give some persistence as well if you see certain people more than once.

We will post the third, and probably final, installment of this update series tomorrow.

Nice.  Can't wait to make sure I plug plate-checker into it, at the least.