LMS

To quote from the PM reply I sent to you: that's completely up to you, neither LCPDFR nor GTA IV provide a way to find the closest interior. Easiest way would be to go from house to house and save coordinates to build a database.

Well, you asked about studying a game and actually developing tools to make mods, so yes, that requires a lot of knowledge. But it's great fun as you can do whatever you like with the game/engine. Writing mods using existing tools not so much :P

At least from my experience Windows 7 works better. I would not waste 20 bucks now when it doesn't work properly. The Steam version's only real benefit is the ability to play without disc, the game code is exactly the same. So better wait until you got a new computer and see how it works. You can then always go for the benefits of the Steam version.

No, nothing I can find, sorry. Game just dies for you due to internal fails, but I can't really connect it to anything (vehicles etc.).

No dependency issues, so the code probably fails. Does it create a logfile? Also note that you can always manually install the taser.

No problem. Hm okay, it's weird but you can leave it that way then. No, it won't be a big problem, it just applies some memory stability patches and installs the taser, but LCPDFR can definitely work without it. It would be appreciated if you could do the same procedure for the file though, i.e. running Dependency Walker on AdvancedHookInit.asi and attaching the results, so I can figure out what the issue is.

Please delete "MSVCR110.DLL" from your game folder and try again.

As I had assumed, you are missing the VC++ 2012 Redist. Please download and install the x86 version from here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30679 (even if you have a 64bit OS!). You can safely put AdvancedHookInit.asi back then as well.

Haha yes, programming concepts are a pain to communicate over the internet. See, I know where you are coming from, it just seemed in earlier posts you didn't fully understand what we manage and what we don't. LCPDFR only spawns entities as necessary (e.g. all criminals required for a callout) and also has concepts to run callouts with the least amount of people required. If it doesn't work at all, you get the "Disregard" message. So I'd say it manages resources quite fair and we are trying to use as less resources as possible (also giving users the ability to customize backup etc. via .ini). Still, those additional criminals and cops need resources which can be a problem, as we can see when it crashes. But don't worry, we are not wasting anything here. I do appreciate your thoughts, it's always good to hear feedback, but be sure we did our best to optimize it (we even have a task scheduler running that delays certain things when performance is bad). Yet it doesn't always help and some people crash every 10 minutes while others (like me) can play for hours.

No, you don't understand the nature of C++ and null pointers/memory faults. Also again, your example does not apply. There is no overwriting happening. In addition, we are not responsible for creating buildings and most of the peds and vehicles are spawned by the game in traffic, we don't do that. It happens entirely in the game code. AdvancedHook already increases the size of the buildings pool, but that doesn't fix other issues in the game code. Also I find it hard to believe ".NET has a tough time managing memory", it only manages its memory, not the game memory! That is done by the IV memory manager written by R*. Your pseudo-code is not applicable, as again, we don't spawn most of the things. Also we have no influence on null pointers introduced by game bugs and/or memory being freed twice. Those are issues leading to crashes in the game! What you are suggesting is essentially is a complete rewrite of all game functions. Look up Access Violations, null pointers etc. on the web to get an idea of how prone C++ programs (which IV is written in) are to such issues.

Sorry, but you do seem to lack significant knowledge of how things work and just throw in random words. Your point simply does not apply here. There is no such thing as "resouce limit" or "further writes". I'll try to keep it simple: Imagine that with every new vehicle spawned, there is a 0,1% chance things will go downhill. Eventually this will crash everything. It's just a matter of time and no way to prevent that. And it's not just vehicles, but for example also the buildings pool is prone to crash, so in some cases just driving through the city will crash you because the game failed to add more buildings. IV lacks proper error handling for such cases, you can read a few more details on the LCPDFR dev blog, where I analyze a few of IV's biggest flaws.

It's pretty simple: LCPDFR demands more resources, which leads to more trouble for IV. Of course playing without mods will help, but it doesn't fix the root cause, which is bad game code.

Again, LCPDFR does not crash your game here. There are numerous issues in the IV code which can crash your game. A few of them are fixed by AdvancedHook which rewrites small parts of the game code, but it doesn't cover all bugs the game has. For instance, a common issue is that sometimes a vehicle model ptr gets read even though it's invalid. Then again the model is loaded so there should be no reason why it is invalid. I've a special fix for this in place so at least ELS can work with those models, but other in-game functions still crash. Blame R*.

No, you got it wrong. If a dependency is missing, AdvancedHook could not load at all and hence LCPDFR wouldn't even start. If it starts, everything is correct. As I said, AdvancedHook does not cause any crash. It only attaches an exception handler to the GTA IV process to log issues within the game itself.

It's clearly a dependency issue and the fact you had to delete AdvancedHookInit.asi most likely shows you are missing the C++ 2012 Redist (x86). Anyway, please download Dependency Walker and open AdvancedHook.dll using it. Then save the results as a .dwi file (File->Save) and either zip them and attach here or upload the file to a file hoster and link here.

Please note that the majority of LCPDFR is written in .NET and hence its memory is managed by the .NET Framework. There is no issue with any kind of overflow or anything like that in our C++ code that is causing crashes, nor is this the reason for this issue. The native is simply not available on your game (GTA IV), since it requires EFLC to work. That's not a problem though and won't lead to a crash.

Please also note AdvancedHook itself does not cause the issues it logs, it only catches all game exceptions and logs them for debugging purposes.

Hm, as you pointed out I've seen this a few times lately. It seems the game crashes while loading a certain model. This is most likely related to the missing texture issue you describe and/or a bad vehicle model. Either way, try lowering settings to avoid texture loss and verify you only have all models installed correctly. You can also try setting "PreloadAllModels" to true.

Upload to a filehoster or zip the file and attach here.

For reverse engineering, you need good assembler and C++ skills. When studying a new game, the first thing I do is checking its protection. If it has one, I try to get rid of it so I can access the real assembler code. This often involves simple memory dumping. Then I load the code into IDA for further analysis. Other useful tools are OllyDbg, Cheat Engine, Scylla etc. Most modern games make use of RTTI, so parsing that is always a helpful first step. Strings (especially debug leftovers) are also a very good indicator for what the game might be doing. From now on, it largely depends on what I want to do. If I'm interested in game files, I check for APIs accessing files. If I'm interested in D3D stuff, I look for DirectX APIs etc. It's all up to you really what you want to do. You may want to check my blog, where I have some posts about early W_D analysis (http://blog.lms-dev.com/reverse-engineering/watch-dogs-first-re-impressions/ and following posts).

LMS OS™, which has the smallest kernel image out there since it directly boots into a command prompt only accepting assembler input ((E)IP points at the command's prompt output, that's what I call live development).

Please download Dependency Walker and open AdvancedHook.dll (File->Open). Then please save the results and upload them somewhere.

Thanks for the kind words, free projects operating on a voluntary base really need people like you. That's why we dedicate our time.

Not a LCPDFR issue, but a problem with the dsound.dll asi loader lacking permissions to create its logfile. Launch the game as admin or consider moving it to a non-regulated directory, i.e. non system drive.

If the first issue is fixed, your game should be pretty stable. Please respond of issue persists.