cp702

The Coast Guard isn't just military in times of war. It's *always* considered one of the armed forces of the United States. All members are subject to the UCMJ; they follow the military chain of command; they operate closely with the Navy (USCG detachments frequently serve on USN ships); they have cutters armed with military radars and weaponry (e.g. 25mm chain guns, 76mm naval artillery). I'm saying this here because I'm carrying over annoyance at a news article decrying militarized police that used the Coast Guard as an example, because they are and always have been a regular component of the actual military. Other than the USCG, the federal military can't serve as law enforcement unless the Insurrection Act applies, which so far has basically been "citywide riots" and "states refusing to enforce federal court orders in civil rights cases". The National Guard can be law enforcement, but again, it's rare and mostly for cases of civil unrest. Massachusetts did call out the state militia during the Boston police strike...in 1919. The National Guard really doesn't do law enforcement. There's also a big advantage equipping more cops with rifles: "Contain and wait for SWAT" has proven to be a really, really bad response to a lot of incidents. Several school shootings only got as far as they did because police set up a perimeter and waited for a SWAT team. Likewise, in a shootout, there isn't necessarily time for a SWAT team to arrive. While the cops are waiting for them, the crime scene isn't in stasis - shots are being actively fired. I'm still not sure why it's worse for cops to have rifles than shotguns. While I understand the philosophy behind "cops shouldn't have weapons normal people can't have", and even agree with it to some extent, that should be applied in the permissive direction. Applying that rule should involve letting non-cops have AR-15s, not saying police can't have them. (also, I specifically didn't use the term "civilians", because police *are* civilians, as they're not in the military. The military does have a need for things which civilians shouldn't be allowed to have).

Any free or nonstandard domain has automatic issues. .com is the most standard for generic stuff. Nonprofits do well with .org, and you might be fine for country-specific things with country-specific domains (e.g. .co.uk), but if you have a site which is not a nonprofit, and you want a worldwide audience, you want .com. The issue with less-standard stuff is precisely that it tends to be somewhat cheaper; that means spammers use it more often.

According to the article, they have full-auto capability because they're military surplus, and were being converted for police use. The department didn't buy full-auto to issue, it bought M16s with full-auto capability from the army (who sells them cheaply), and was making them semi-auto because they didn't want/need officers having fully automatic weapons (also, note that all M16s also have a semi-automatic mode, so presumably any of the rifles that were handed to officers while waiting for the converters to get around to them came with the rule "only use on semi-auto").

I don't see why it's more serious giving a cop an AR-15 than a Glock. My understanding is a rifle is basically a superior weapon to a pistol or shotgun, both of which are generally standard issue. If shotguns are fine, why not rifles? Unless something is really odd, the AR-15 they'd be issued is semi-automatic only, so yeah. Not sure why a shotgun is more acceptable than one.

Even if it's legal, we do not support people using cracks under any circumstances. Even if it's legal, we do not support people using cracks under any circumstances.

Er, no. The only way to make a game exactly compatible with the current script is to exactly clone GTA IV. The script isn't some Platonic ideal; it's designed to work with GTA IV, and only GTA IV. And I'm not sure you know what you're talking about with "given all the resources to make a game" - again, that's both tens of millions of dollars, AND years of work by extremely talented programmers, designers, 3D modelers, artists, voice actors, producers, etc. All of them worked on it full-time, as GTA was their day job. You can't just be "given" that - a 3-person team is in no way capable of producing something like GTA IV in pretty much any length of time. It's just not possible. Furthermore, you cannot be given years of your life; if the team wished to make a game as good as GTA, it would be their primary job. A game the quality of GTA is simply not possible from the dev team. A game a quarter the quality would basically require it to be their main job, and would take years. It would then cost a lot of money, because they have to pay the bills during those years of work, and the market isn't nearly as big as for IV. And the end result would be much worse, quite likely. That's why "make it into a game" is never, ever going to happen. It's not "push a button".

You write a script inheriting from Callout instead of whatever normal SHDN scripts inherit from. You then use a combination of things from the SHDN API and things from the API.

Basically: LCPDFR isn't even CLOSE to being remotely anything that could be its own game. If we did make our own game, the result would be worse in many ways than doing a GTA IV mod. GTA provides for us a relatively stable, highly advanced engine that handles almost everything that happens ingame. LCPDFR really just is a little tweak on it to change a few behaviors here and there. When we have the suspect cuffed, RAGE actually handles the cuffing by playing the animation developed by someone at Rockstar. When you fire a gun, the gun, its model, the damage done, the health of the target, the flinching of the guy it hits, the animation if you miss - that's all Rockstar's doing. LCPDFR is really a minor thing compared with the scale of the game we piggyback on. And here's the thing - we didn't have to develop that game. By building it on GTA IV, we can gain access to a super-advanced engine with decent-quality low-resource-load content (e.g. Rockstar's car models are superior in detail per polygon to every single GTA car mod I've seen; modders are just not as good at keeping poly counts down) produced to professional standards. We gain access, in short, to tens of millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours of work. And it costs us just 20 dollars per person who wants to play LCPDFR. And the best thing is, we don't even have to pay it - you guys willingly pay the 20 dollars for IV or EFLC, and we then know that you have that incredibly advanced game we can use. Basically, LCPDFR is massively subsidized by every single person who buys GTA IV or EFLC for console, and every single person who buys it for PC and does not use LCPDFR. If we were to develop our own game, we'd lose that - you'd have to pay a ton of money for a worse experience. That's why we won't do it.

Why wouldn't it be? That's generally the standard for any free thing, as well as any patch for any product. Bugging people for a release date is like sitting in a car and asking the driver "are we there yet?" Don't do it; it's not very polite to bug people for release dates.

Same as for 1.0 itself - its done when its done.

This section is for help and suggestions about the website itself, not about GTA modding. Moving to correct section.

Also, wrong section. This section is only for support with the website or suggestions about the website. Anything not about those is off-topic. Moving.

Wrong section. This is for *website* support/suggestions, not LCPDFR ones. Moving.

Advice: Don't start too complicated. Even partial versions of this mod would be nice. Also, any good mod is good to have.

Wait, what? This thread is requesting additional callouts with the LCPDFR 1.0 API. That's an intended effect of the API: It means that 1.0 ships with less focus on callouts, because they can be easily provided modularly. What does "1.0 not being good enough" have to do with this?

That was sort of entirely my point. I was saying that we *want* the ability to decline calls.

Mine's not under $1000, but it is a laptop, and I have run into issues caused by an underpowered system (e.g. NOOSE backup disappeared as soon as I turned around). However, that was largely fixed by release. Or maybe I'm remembering wrong, and it was an issue on my old desktop but not my laptop. One of the two. Also, everyone: we did test. The early revisions had a whole lot of bugs. All the issues people report on the final release generally represent just a handful of different bugs. The revisions had over 150 bugs that were reported by testers and fixed before release. Keep in mind that there are under 40 members of the testing team, and some of them are inactive by now. The mod was tested by around 20 people. We now have over 15,000 downloads of it. It's not surprising that there'd be a few things we missed. I guess pro developers never, ever have that issue. That's why the version of IV that the mod needs is patch 7.

Both example callouts provided with LCPDFR spawn peds at any clear spot on the street. However, suppose I want to, say, spawn characters in a nearby bar. I have a list of bar interiors with coordinates for each one. What would I do to get them to properly spawn a) inside and b) randomly chosen from the list, rather than with LCPDFR's "pick spot around" function?

OK, yes. You guys saw past our extremely clever disguise and realized this was in fact the 1.0 countdown. At this point, the purpose of this thread has been fulfilled, and there's no reason to keep it open. Nothing to see here! This topic has been closed by LCPDFR.com staff. If you feel that this topic has been closed in error, please report this post.

I don't know? We never tested a mix of 0.95 and 1.0. Can script mods cause MP crashes like content mods can?

That skin is built in to Windows 7 as the "classic" theme, I think. It's also in Windows Server, where it's the default.

Yeah, we mixed that one up. The busy/not busy texts are reversed.

Rank system is very, very unlikely to be implemented - it doesn't fit with the style of LCPDFR. Keep in mind LCPDFR is designed to provide the tools for you to act as a police officer, and is generally guided by reality. The way ranks work in real life, especially in big departments, has nothing whatsoever to do with rank structures that people would like to see in a game. For example the top rank in the real NYPD means you spend all your time in an office, doing paperwork, sitting in meetings, speaking to the press, dealing with the commissioner, etc. - you are absolutely not going to be in a SWAT team, both because your own job as chief takes up all your time, and because by the time you reach the rank, you're not young and nimble anymore. A highly-ranked officer responding to a call will sit in a command post and coordinate *other* officers dealing with it; he won't generally go out and deal with things himself, because he's too busy doing his own job as a supervisor to do a patrolman's job as well. Essentially, ranks as people imagine them for LCPDFR are arcade-style ideas; while there's nothing inherently wrong with them, they don't fit with the rest of the mod. As for lunch/dinner, paperwork - You can go to a Burger Shot in LC and grab a burger, or grab a hot dog from a street vendor, just like in vanilla GTA IV. LCPDFR isn't likely to implement a restaurant sim, and I'm not sure what the advantage would be of a system where you go in, screen fades to black, screen fades back in, and it says "You ate." Not sure what you mean by "like Mord's EMS setup" - do you mean that calls just dispatch you, instead of asking for confirmation? While that'd be more realistic, it also loses some flexibility. Not everyone likes all calls, so it asks you if you want that particular call. If you mean "shows what you're responding to", that would actually potentially be nice.