celticfang

Nah you're too expensive Jesse Cox is taking pre orders for $14.99 for PC GTAV Comes with a free Terraria copy too and it's on iTunes Nobody will get that reference surely....if you do you've probably watched ALL of his Terraria playthrough. (Seriously though I won't believe anything until it's out, i've heard WAY too many rumors about it and it's being released today tomorrow, the 30th of Feb, the 32nd of August you get the picture)

Actually..... Going back to the old DOS days you had a few police titles out there. Sierra/Dynamix (the GOOD Sierra with Al Lowe and company at the time) did Police Quest. That was a police sim/adventure game, the remake of PQ1.......less serious. I believe they are/were on GOG.com for $10 for all four games, though I don't cout 4 as part of the series personally. It sold VERY well...but that was mostly down to Sierra being a hot property at the time. Here's a TVTropes type list for the PQ series: Things common to both: Radios. You had to use (and in PQ1 and remake and PQ3, get) a radio and keep it on you. Guns: You had to follow procedure. PQ2 deviated by letting you shoot anyone but it gave you a game over if you shot anyone bar who the game wants you to shoot. PQ1 and remake wouldn't let you draw your gun anywhere (but PQ1 let you pull the trigger while the gun was holstered....leading to a game over! Paperwork: You had to fill in forms. And for PQ1/remake you had the then-California penal codes as copy protection for the remake. Sierra logic: PQ1, forget to walk around your car? Death. PQ2. Stand by a door when a SWAT team enters? Death. PQ1 remake: Use your gun on a guy that is threatening you with a weapon? Death (Hint: The answer to that one is to brandish a nightstick at four bikers who have pool cues....again Sierra logic), PQ2. Try to drive off at the start of the game? You get pulled over and told to go to the PD. PQ3. Forget to slow down for a turn (it's easy to do with the awful driving i PQ3).......your car explodes. You get the picture. PQ1: Radio to Dispatch whenever you did anything. Couldn't go through lights withoout code 3, had to follow proper procedure, had to attend briefings, walk around your squad car to check for defects (else you died after getting in. Sierra logic!) PQ2: See PQ1 with the exception of driving (that shifted the focus to a detective game), you had to go to a gun range and manually tweak your gun settings, you had to radio in when you did things. PQ3: Darker storyline. Changed driving (AGAIN) Traffic stops made a reappearence. Highway patrol Corrupt cops (Spoiler: It's somebody you meet in the first five minutes of the game who is an antagonist) PQ4: Pretty much EVERYTHING changed. Then there was Blue Force. I forgot who made it It was very different than the PQ series, but it shared some of the same things (briefings, radios) but it had you play as a bike cop up to a certain point. Then there's another RTS one hat I really, REALLY enjoy from 20 years ago called To Serve and Protect. In it you are the police chie of a city and control everything from fuding and staffing to sending units to respond to calls. I believe the publisher went out of business though so no clue where you can get it (Actually I do but I'm not going to post a link) Now as for the 'are sims popular' idea... Yes and no. Stuff like flight sims and ARMA's accepted. Stuff like a police sim/farming sim would be too 'geeky'. Plus there's other issues. For instance when making ARMA/OpFlash Bohemia couldn't get licenses for the guns or the vehicles so they called them by their military names. It's the old thing of 'yeah we'll let you use our guns or cars provided this ad this happen or this does't happen else we will pull our licensing' As for an in depth simulator... IMO it won't sell simply because the demand isn't there. If a typical 8 hour shift is 60% paperwork then peple would get bored, Or to put it anther way policing isn't what people think it is. What people want is Hollywood policing. That sort of simulator would sell very well. EDIT As far as train sims go, in the original MSTS (and FS9/FSX) the train/plane makers asked MS to dummy out systems on their vehicles so people couldn't go and hop in.....say.......a 737 or a train and start it and run off with it . FWIW train companies are a LOT more protective of their stuff than airlines, which maes me wonder how Run8 got the okay to fully model their trains with the same companies.

Since we're all pulling the pirate card....here's my story.. I'm (technically) a pirate. Why? Because I download old DOS games to my laptop to play when I'm not at home. Most of them, you can't buy anywhere at all, they don't show up on eBay or Amazon or Listia or Craiglist or any of the gaming sites.....and even if you do get them, do you really think a modern PC's gnna have a 5 1/4 inch floppy drive or a 1.44mb floppy drive? Or that (say) Civ 1 is gonna run in Win7 or 8? The ones I do download legally? I buy from GOG and rarely Steam if they got them, but they don't have every game (Fallout springs to mind, it got removed ad now the only way to get it is via piracy now it's in legal limbo). Same with GTA IV, I used a workaround to disable GFWL on my main PC so I could use a 100% save file with LCPDFR. I disabled GFWL on Dirt 2 and 3 so I could run the cars and tracks I wanted to without having to play through a horrible campaign mode. If that makes me a pirate I'll take it for being able to play my GFWL games when that service gets shut down. Before I got heavily into Steam, I used NoCD/NoDVD patches for the sole fact that it didn't wear my CDs and DVDs out as much. I already bought the game, the publisher got my money.....and you couldn't exactly go dow to EB (yeah showing my age here) and ask for a new CD. Tried that with Half Life. Got told to sod off. Actually in one game, it's recommended you HAVE to use a pirate NoCD to get the full game? Why? Because when GTR2 was released on Steam, licesing issues meant certain cars weren't included. So on all the big race sim sites, they have topics detailing how to get and use the patch to restore all the content. (yes, that's the exception, not the rule)

That is of course unless R* goes and patches GFWL out of IV (and V and so on) Which.......as usual, they've been silent about

Games for Windows and GFWL aren't the same thing though. Khanage, if you own the material (GTA for instance) or want to be a jerk, you can hit somebody with a takedown notice for any reason at all, For instance last year there was a French company going around getting files taken off of Mediafire, due to false DMCA claims. Given that happened.....it's stupidly easy (and it pretty much doesn't matter where) to claim something as your own when you don't in fact own it. Worst bit? Practically 0 penalty for doing so. E.g. G17 makes an LCPDFR 2.0 preview video. Somebody comes along, maybe hates GTA or hates G17, they flag the video as their own and demand it gets taken down with a copyright claim. Youtube takes it down and the onus is on G17 to prove that takedown was wrong. That's just how Youtube works and it'll only ever get worse. Aren't we all glad Youtube got bought up by Google? (No, I'm not!)

Why? I mean, why do BPD even want AR-15s for 100 cops total? What if one of those 100 is off work, will they then have a stand in, eaining actually 101 or 102 or 105 cops? Rifles have a higher bullet speed than a pistol though and are far more intimidating. You wave a pistol in front of soebody and they may think it's a water pistol or a toy cap gun. Wave an assault rifle around and suddenly you aren't screwing around at all. I am of the opinion that they don't need AR-15s or M16s or Comando rifles at all for the rank and file BPD. Don't they have SWAT teams that are ready to go? SWAT are trained to deal with bad situations. Knowing the reputation of SOME cops in Mass (disclaimer I spend a fair few months of very year around the Mass/Conneticut state line area):, I don't feel okay with those untrusted cops having high powered rifles. See to my eyes a cop isn't automatically given trust just because they passed a firearms course and got a shiny certificate. They have to earn that trust and if that's by carrying the weapon but not using it unless the siiuation demands it, so be it. Then the trust'd be earned in my eyes. It's the same, to go off n a small tangent, with regular cops, some cops figure they graduated the academy so the world owes them a favor. THOSE are the cops I do not want having assault rifles. THOSE are the cops I referred to as untrusted. A shotgun, yes because a) pellet spread and b) lower muzzle velocity compared to a military spec rifle. Remember the AR-15 is the civilian equivalent of the M16 military assault rifle. EDIT: SLIGHT tangent here again but didn't the LAPD only adopt ARs as standard issue post North Hollywood shootout? IIRC prior to that they figured they weren't needed. Then those two nutjobs decided to go into a bank with home made armor and nigh on actual machine guns when all the cops had were standard 9mm pistols. I'd much, much rather they (the PD/DoD/DARPA/whoever else) put money into LtL methods to bring criminals in alive if possible though, in combination with other methods. There's no magic bullet. For all we know giving the BPD AR-15s may well spur off an arms race, or it may not.

Checksums. Yeah, they aren't perfect but they're a good way to detect pirated versions and honestly if you're going to the trouble of matching checksums as a pirate, you're wasting your time for one mod

Besides I'd rather not go for 100% realism (or what some people think of as realism) as it's impossible in a game or a sim (how many people would like permadeath?) and go with what I term 'hollywood realism', I.e. the normal and hardcore modes are fine, the ragdoll bullet effects I do love in HC mode, the being able to script in an M4 out of your trunk is fine with me. It may not BE 100% realistic but GTA IV isn't either, in the vanilla game you can restore most of your health with a single hot dog and you don't need to worry about fuel or taxes. Personally I'm fine with that level of realism and I'd rather have the option to do crazy stuff if I want to. There's days when I want to play 100% serious and times when I want to screw around and I don't want to be forced to play strict if I don't feel like it End of the day LCPDFR is just a tool, it's up to the players how they use it. Or short version? Don't code in arbitrary restrictions that negatively affect gameplay for the sake of realism. There's mods out there that make the game more realistic and each one of us has their own personal level of realism anyhow.

But let's say you're playing as a NOOSE or FIB player model, you wouldn't be doing traffic stops or drunk drivers would you if you wanted to keep it real? Just as an ordinary beat cop wouldn't be dispatched to every single call. I feel that as far as dispatching goes you do need the option to say no I can't do that call, maybe because you're already in a call or pursuit. Imagine if you're in a pursuit and suddenly you get dispatched to a shootout. Or you're in a shootout and get auto-dispatched to a fight, it'd break the flow of whatever you were doing, so it's a no from me to auto-dispatch. I prefer the way it is now with the yes/no system. Though, if you don't take a call do the AI take it or could that be added into the dispatch like how the AI reacts when the player calls for a transport and an AI cop responds, if the player says no to a call, have an AI jump in to take that call, even if they don't actually go there it gives the impression they're doing stuff, which helps with the idea LC is a living city and the player isn't the only cop out there taking calls. Besides, real cops (since everyone's so keen to play the 'realism' card) can call back to dispatch and say hey, I can't do that call because I'm at a crime scene/not in a car/in a pursuit/whatever reason.

Gonna give that a go, thanks. Does it matter that I run it in a window since if I run it full screen it absolutely loves to BSOD on me though?

Specs? Okay here you go: Processor: Athlon II X64 640 3Ghz Graphics: GTX 480 RAM: 8GB, OS: Win7 64bit I can run other demanding games (Crysis 2-3, Ghosts) maxed out though whereas IV seems to under report what I got but I do notice IV leaking memory like crazy. It may not be my system though as I've had the slow loading issue on a number of machines, desktop, lower spec laptop, higher spec older PC Any command lines I can use to maybe speed it up? Also I have the LAA flag set but how can I tell IV to use 6 outof my 8 gig of RAM?

Running LaunchGTAIV as admin yeah and list of mods? LCPDFR SNT That's it but even on a vanilla mod-free install it takes just as long to load in from the main menu. Sidenote: I like the loading screen theme but it gets old when I'm hearing it after EVERY crash. So any way to silence it or lower the volume or no?

I have a feeling I'm the first to get carbombed on duty. Pulled over a van. Expired license came up so I went to give it back. Next thing I know I hear beeping and the van, my cruiser and about 40 other cars went bang after clogging up the road EDIT: Of course the cops and civs all go TOWARDS the explosions. /sigh.... Ended up with about 40 cars blown up in total. Pretty big fireworks display

Anyone else get long (4-5 minue) loading times or infinte loading screen? I'm sat here with IV in windowed mode just loading and loading and loading for 2 minutes, any definitive ways to speed it up?

Since 1.0 is released and people are having issues running other mods with it.....AND you guys say install on a clean IV install then people go and don't do that anyway figuring it'd work... Could 1.0 be set to not install (at least with the automated installer) if modded files are detected, similar to how it it won't if IV isn't properly set up or has a crack in it? Manual one's a lot harder to use though and (sadly) I know of at least one person with a pirated IV who has FR installed on it. (but that's another topic) Something like: Your GTA IV install is modified, please reinstall the game and LCPDFR before instaling any other mods. Second bit of my idea, and Killing Floor has this in a way so I fgured it may work here. A 'whitelist' of mods that LCPDFR is known to not have issues with, that are 100% compatible and more to the point, easy to use. Obviously mods would have to be checked and added to it but the community can say yes mod X works or no mod Y has issues because of this and this. Would it be worth it not offering support to people then running blacklisted mods much the sam way you do crack users? So say I have a car mod that's known to cause issues/crash the game and make a topic I'd expect to not get any support if it was stated that the mod I was running isn't supported at all.