Vice City: Multiplayer

This guide is to help anyone that would want to establish customizing vehicle performance to what they see fit without dealing with all the guesswork of what numbers to use. By using this guideline, you will gain an understanding of what effect on the vehicle each setting gravitates towards as you increase or decrease the values you choose to set. My findings are incomplete but since it's in high demand, I decided to fill the void now and update later.

[spoiler=PLEASE READ NOTICE]
All results you're about to see were done:

• At 60 fps constant
• In clear weather conditions
• Tested on a rear-wheel drive vehicle
• Vehicle had equal distribution of brake force between front and rear wheels (unless stated changed)

Also, a good portion of the results isn't scientifically proven (meaning not everything I account for was measured for statistically significant differences). Most of it is just personal observation of the differences I feel in the vehicle. So these areas may hold less weight and it is open for scientific proofing for validation. Anywhere I state numerical results means that I validated it; if it doesn't, it's just observation and personal feeling.

This guide also assumes you know how to edit XML data for custom vehicles. For ease of mind this link here (http://almost610.ucoz.com/blog/xml_builder/2012-12-23-1) should be able to help you out most of the way on how each setting affects the car's characteristics bodily wise. I'm filling out the performance aspect.

Most values were shifted by a magnitude of 1 in either direction (negative or positive) from its original value unless I state that something took an extreme (note the word choice, not if I say high or low, only extreme) increase/decrease in value to achieve the result (in which case, such values were shifted by a magnitude of 10).

When I say setting values to low, for most values this means using negative numbers. The only exception to the rule are bias settings where those only use positive numbers and have a range of just 0 to 1 and settings that only work with positive ranges (like mass and number of gears).
[/spoiler]

---

[spoiler=RESULTS]
Flags

1G_BOOST - this flag speeds up the acceleration rate of the first gear. If this setting is disabled, you will hear the vehicle have a delay in sound to when the engine rev kicks in. The car is still moving but the rev is low and tamed. Enabling this setting skips that delay completely and the engine revs with max acceleration from the start

• Disabled - 2.5 seconds to shift out of 1st gear
• Enabled - 2 seconds to shift out of 1st gear

2G_BOOST - this flags does the same as the 1G_BOOST but for 2nd gear. The difference however is much smaller (almost insignificant). Negligible enough to be ignored, however, it might help heavy vehicles greatly in theory (didn't test to check).

• Disabled - 1.65 seconds to shift out of 2nd gear
• Enabled - 1.5 seconds to shift out of 2nd gear

IS_LOW - this flag seems to lower the centre of gravity of the vehicle making it slightly harder for vehicles to roll (was not tested with a van that has more rolling capability so results may vary)

REARWHEEL1ST - this I believe increases the bias of wheel drive power to the rear wheels. The car is notably faster with the setting OFF rather than ON (my guess is the increased power to the rear wheel causes a bottleneck in traction, leading to more wheel spin & burnout but less propulsion of the vehicle)

• Disabled - 6 seconds from point A to point B (in sand)
• Enabled - 6.2 seconds from point A to point B (in sand)

GOODINSAND - namesake, improves handling of the vehicle in sand. No change in general speed, but acceleration from stationary to 2nd gear greatly improved (especially on an incline in sand)


NEUTRALHANDLING - no observable changes (maybe helps bikes instead, never tested)


That covers the flags that I found and/or believed would have some effect on vehicle performance. Now we go into the variable attributes that you can set to any value (sort of).


Mass - PAY ATTENTION FOR THIS ONE. You would think this one should be as straightforward as deceleration was for brakes. You would be horribly wrong. It turns out, this is the most illogical setting of them all. So sit tight while I explain this.

In terms of collision force, this is logical and holds true to reality. The greater the mass, the stronger the force you generate hitting other vehicles and vice versa. Handling is unaffected whether it's high or low mass. We can debate whether this is true to life or not but for me I don't think it matters enough to be an argument considering the rest of settings.

Logical reasoning ends right there my friends.....

This is because the more mass you add, the FASTER your vehicle will go. You essentially become a speed hacking tank driving around. It's sheer madness.

Similarly the lesser the mass, the SLOWER your vehicle will go. You essentially become a snail with the force of paper.

This makes changing the mass of your vehicle very tricky, and is what inspires Part 2 to this guide, where I will calculate all the relationships of the settings to keep performance at a constant.




Dimensions - NEEDS TO BE STRICTLY CONSIDERED. Through my investigation of vehicle models versus the data presented in handling.cfg of the game files, most settings don't add up one bit. Ever notice that outside top speed and maybe acceleration, almost every car in a specific category kinda feels like it handles the same? Despite the reality of vehicle size variations, most vehicle stats are generalized in their dimensions. If you look through the game stats, you'll see predominantly for the x axis (this controls width of the vehicle) that the setting is 2.0 m with little variation outside this (an Infernus is much wider than the tiny Manana car for example but they have the same x axis value in game stats). The y axis (vehicle length from front to back) and z axis (vehicle height) seem to show a lot more variation that more or less reflects truthfully the vehicle's actual model dimensions.

Now what effect does the dimensions have on the vehicle if all other things are equal? It affects WEIGHT and HANDLING. The bigger the vehicle dimensions, the heavier it seems to feel and is noted by a large reduction in speed, lower jumps, stronger collision force, everything you'd expect of a bigger vehicle. Also the bigger the vehicle, the more it feels like a van, or truck - sluggish in turns and has higher chance rolling onto it's roof (probably proportionately changes centre of mass as well to cause this). Inversely, the smaller the dimension, the more the quicker and nimbler the vehicle. Feels like a toy race car the lower you go, and the car becomes lighter, thus higher jumps, decreased collision force etc. (and is able to ragdoll like crazy if you crash in air).


Centre of mass - determines where most of the mass of the vehicle is distributed against the dimensions of the vehicle. Each axis gives a different result.

• X axis - the car will balance on two wheels depending on direction pretty much like this:
  
  (https://i.ytimg.com/vi/qz_oN6qjL6E/hqdefault.jpg)
  
  It's impossible to drive in this state, but if set to an appropriate level where all 4 wheels are on the ground, the car will have a tendency to roll when you turn in the opposite direction of centre of mass (so if the centre of mass has a left bias like the picture shown, then if you turn your vehicle right, it will roll over and vice versa). The side of the car that has centre of mass bias makes sharper turns whilst the weaker side understeers and tends to want to lift up should you hit a bump let's say. Vehicle will have the tendency to want to rotate clockwise/anti-clockwise up to a point when in mid-air after a jump depending on the respective side of mass distribution (if the centre of mass is to the left, the vehicle rotates anti-clockwise slightly and vice versa)
• Y axis - This operates similarly to what you would expect of the traction bias but make note that they are NOT equivalent settings. They both cause distinct effects on the vehicle that rightly sets them apart.
  
  When the centre of mass is distributed to the front of the vehicle, the car's traction at the front increases greatly and ultimately causes the vehicle to suffer (too much traction at the front causing rolling resistance when turning under speed). The rolling resistance slows down the vehicle considerably with every turn you make. Turning becomes less nimble and tends to increase understeering. The vehicle also tends to glide very smoothly in a straight line to the direction you're facing when bringing the vehicle to a sudden stop. The vehicle nose dives when jumping and cannot drift whatsoever.
  
  Vehicle is also slightly slower in acceleration:
  
  • 7.1 seconds to 5th gear default centre of mass
  • 7.5 seconds to 5th gear under front-end biased adjustments
  
  When the centre of mass is distributed to the back of the vehicle, acceleration is unaffected and the back-end of the vehicle tends to spin out with every turn you make. Impossible to drive at these levels, but if set appropriately, the vehicle becomes extremely nimble, and the turning is much sharper (it's like driving a Cheetah but nimbler in a good way). Back of the vehicle dips when taking jumps.
  
• Z axis - vehicle tends to roll very easily when set to higher heights. Vehicle also jumps higher but not farther. Other than that, nothing else really feels different. When set to lower heights, the vehicle becomes resistant to those bumps that would lift your wheel from off the ground. Vehicle jumps lower but farther.

Traction - traction is the grip your wheels have on the road. When set to low values, the loss of grip causes:

• Increased braking time
• Understeering
• Reduced top speed

In contrast, increasing the traction value eliminates wheel spins, decreases brake time and leans towards oversteering (but in a very very good way, so good it's like it reduces input lag, making the vehicle feel more responsive to your controls). The increased traction however also causes reduced top speed as the engine power is now the bottleneck (causing rolling resistance).


Traction loss - I'm not sure under what circumstances this setting gets applied but it has a critical function.

If this setting is set too low, the vehicle loses all capability to stop (the perfect body in motion as an example for our physicists here). If you so much as touch the vehicle, giving it a tiny bump with your player, it will slide away forever.

With the setting set high, the vehicle has increased steering agility with an increased susceptibility to want to roll over IF steering is locked (not sure why on that though). Other than that, pretty much mimics the traction high settings.


Traction bias - determines the level of traction distribution between the front and the rear wheel. If the value is set up to 1 (front wheels), the vehicle cannot be driven and the rear wheels spin out. If the value is set to 0 (rear wheels), the vehicle is able to drive and feels like normal but the vehicle cannot turn. Therefore traction bias is a balance of turning ability and acceleration. They have an inversely proportional relationship.



Number of gears - setting this to a lower value does decrease the speed but not as significant as you would expect (29 seconds form point A to point B using a lower value vs 28 seconds at highest settings) . This setting also does not follow completely true to life. I didn't have a speedometer so I have no way of confirming definitively that I was hitting the same maximum velocity, however the difference in vehicle performance seems negligible enough to ignore this setting.

One thing you SHOULD NEVER DO is set the value above 5. This COMPLETELY GLITCHES THE GAME. If you drive a vehicle with 6 gears, it may try to fly and bounce off all manner of debris, 7 gears may bounce around all over the map, 8 gears flat out freezes the game and hangs the PC system. DO NOT USE ANY VALUE ABOVE 5!!!. You have been warned.


Engine type - in reality there are advantages and disadvantages to electric, petrol and diesel engines in terms of performance. GTA Vice City ignores all that jazz so this is a setting you don't need to tamper with, there's no difference in performance between all 3.

What it does is make a visual change in the exhaust smoke (different colour between diesel and petrol, no smoke at all for electric engine).


Acceleration - fairly straightforward setting. The more you give, the faster you will accelerate. However there is a point where traction becomes a bottleneck and you will get no further benefit from going crazy in acceleration. So it is definitely a balancing act to achieve as high of an acceleration as you want (though arguably this balancing act could be cheated with setting the mass higher, seeing how illogical that is right?). Most of the acceleration happens in the first gear. Lower settings just means lower performance, no change to handling.




Brake - what's used to stop the vehicle


Deceleration - pretty obvious really but I tested just to make sure. More you give it, the stronger the brakes, the less you give it the weaker the brakes.

Brake bias - determines the distribution of brake force between the front and the rear wheels.

A value of 0 (rear wheels) makes the vehicle perform very sharp turns when braking. However brake performance to stop the vehicle gets worse. Similarly with a value of 1 (front) the brake performance is as worse as 0 than if the brake force was evenly distributed (0.5). The vehicle refuses to turn and drifts in a straight line and braking and turning with a brake bias of 1.

0.5 gives the best stopping power, and this is to be expected, as it is never a good thing to have brake bias in real life AFAIK.



Suspension - the suspension is what is used to adjust the vehicles height (height of the vehicle body from the axle of the wheels) as well as what eradicates the jerky effects of driving over bumps in the road, keeping the body of the vehicle in a stable parallel position to the ground (shock absorbance properties).


Force level - In extreme cases, the vehicle resists bumps in the road, however, a good strong bump that would normally cause spin-outs can now send you flying. I attribute this to the fact that the vehicle at these very high settings becomes bouncy in a stable way. All in all, the suspension becomes STIFF and should not be mistaken to be used to gain more shock absorbance.

Vehicle height is also affected by this sing (the higher the value, the bigger the gap between the vehicle body and the wheels and vice versa).


Dampening - this is the setting that is for the shock absorbance properties of the suspension. High settings makes bumps a thing of the past, but it is not all happy days doing so. The way a suspension works is that it compresses itself upon hitting a bump, which therefore makes the body of the car remain relatively as leveled as it was to the ground before the bump. It is because of that fact that increasing this dampening value also inhibits jumping capability (your vehicle basically absorbs too much out of any ramp and just tries to head straight, completely leveled). The vehicle body also elevates away from the wheels as well with this setting.

Too low of a value and the vehicle is impossible to drive. The vehicle just bounces around to any and everything. Appropriate settings are therefore recommended when it comes to dampening.


Upper limit - Not a useful setting to change from defaults in my opinion as it causes some strange effects. At high settings, the wheels begin to rotate along the y axis and mimic the cheat "SEAWAYS" when driving on water (the wheels change to that look). Vehicle is also lowered to the ground as a result.

In low settings, the vehicle simulates 100% traction loss, only this time the wheels are glitched into the floor. As stated, best not to trouble this one.


Lower limit - lower settings raises the body of the vehicle significantly. Could be useful if you would want to have a vehicle model similar to monster trucks like this

(https://forum.vc-mp.org/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.rantnow.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2016%2F12%2Fl261b0f7b25ccb845866767a3b651a51monster-truck-7.jpg&hash=95eb7d3d713fea3eabe2331e168c6277384b12d5)

However note that you if you do not increase the size of the wheels appropriately, low settings will make the body of the vehicle look like its floating in mid-air.

The setting also amplifies dampening in and gives a more realistic result of how the wheels adjust to bumps in real life (that springy look) and makes the car more susceptible to rolling (like a van as the height of the vehicle has been increased tremendously).

In high settings, the vehicle body is on the ground while the wheels are in the air. Therefore high positive values are not good values to use with this setting.


Bias - again, distribution of suspension settings between the front and the rear wheels. A value of 1 keeps the front wheels high but lowers the rear wheels. This introduces vehicle bumper scraping as you drive along. No real observable differences in performance and handling outside this fact however.

A value of 0 does the opposite, it keeps the rear wheels up while the front wheels are lowered, causing the same effect as stated above. One addition however with this setting is that the vehicle now tends to be bouncy with bumps as you hit them, so it's kind of unstable to use this value.


Antidive - this setting prevents the vehicle from leaning in a certain direction when stopping (the inertia effect that tilts the car forward or backward when stopping) and thus keeps the vehicle leveled at all times. The way how the game implements this is like an invisible force that pushes either the front-end or the back-end of the vehicle upwards in the air depending on how you're stopping.

So when stopping from driving forward, the front of the vehicle leans down to the ground. This setting therefore a applies and upward force at the front of the vehicle to cancel that inertia. Likewise, when you're stopping from reversing, the back of the vehicle leans down to the ground, and this function now applies an upward force to the back-end to negate the effect

If you go extremely high on this setting, the vehicle will flip onto its roof like you would flip a remote in your hand everytime you stop. Therefore, appropriate settings are needed for this. If you hit the sweetspot, the car will remain 100% leveled when you stop, however, this has a negative effect on brake time that is of similar magnitude as setting 100% brake bias to a particular direction.

All negative values for this setting seem to have no effect on the vehicle, therefore only use positive values for this attribute.[/spoiler]

thank ya, this would help me alot

Part 2 to this is gonna address some things in the works. I'm gonna tackle some important areas like:

• whether FPS differences produce any significant changes to care about having frame limiter on vs off
• rainy weather assessment
• golden ratio that will keep vehicle performance the same no matter how you change up your settings
• front wheel vs rear wheel vs all wheel drive differences

I have some insight on the golden ratio aspect right now but I'm not done yet. Basically, as stated before, the dimensions affect the speed of the vehicle, the bigger you set it the slower you'll go. What I was testing is how much you would need to increase acceleration stats to negate the decreased speed and achieve the original performance.

So far, my data points to a ratio of 4 : 3, acceleration : dimension. Apply this ratio in either direction (bigger dimension or smaller) and you should get the same performance out of your vehicle speed wise. This completely ignored the fact that the vehicle handles differently and also after a point in bigger dimensions this ratio will start to taper slightly, so it not perfectly linear, which is to be expected as you have many other conditions that I haven't accounted for yet to give a final conclusive answer. But as a dirty ratio to temporarily work by, it serves its purpose well.

The point where the dimensional changes are too much for acceleration stats alone to handle, I added top speed changes at that point and that seemed to negate the taper. The ratio I got for that was 1.465 : 1, top speed : dimensions. I don't remember at what point in the dimensions that was but I know it was of an impractical size (larger than truck stats) so for all intents, the rough acceleration ratio again should serve well

Also to note, while these changes will give you the same result from point A to point B in a straight-line, the vehicle does behave differently. Smaller dimensions tend to accelerate slower but hit higher top speeds balancing it out, while larger dimensions are the opposite. So that's also something to consider.

Thats actually a cool guide. Much informative. Which solemnly proves you are a physics student :D

Nice gift buddy.
Sharing such a big documentation and expect nothing... that's how a community work, survive and improve.

Quote from: Sebastian on Aug 02, 2017, 07:29 PMNice gift buddy.
Sharing such a big documentation and expect nothing... that's how a community work, survive and improve.

What else should he expect? There are thousands of such 'giveaways' that aren't awarded any sort of appreciation. Look at SLC's modules. Those are perhaps the most advanced open-source projects in terms of coding that VC:MP players ever saw. Yet they still complain that they can't make a shitty registration system or open a SQL database to read from it. Aside of 4-5 players, no one uses it despite being much more reliable than the official plugin and providing accurate error information and proper memory handling. This is what you get when the community is based around players of ages 11-15 who only seek their own benefit and that's nothing you can change.

He dedicates personal time to improve the standards of a project that I don't think he played more than 4 or 5 times and he spends time trying to understand SDK functions to provide proper documentation/function names yet no one cares.

Regardless of what's listed above, I'm going to sticky this topic because it provides great information for everyone.

I'm very aware of this. I've said for numerous times that SLC deserves the most to be a developer.
Pushing away such persons is not going to bring any good to vcmp.

PS:  I didn't post my opinion to discredit others' work. Just wanted to encourage him.
Seems like i've been understood wrongly

Quote from: Sebastian on Aug 02, 2017, 07:29 PMexpect nothing

What kind of benefits do you expect for that? A colorized nick as for wiki contributor? Community runned by nepotism won't be progressive.

Part 2

[spoiler=FRAME LIMITER, ON OR OFF?]FRAME RATE

For this I tackled 3 specific frame rates:

• 60 FPS
• 30 FPS
• 20 FPS

[spoiler=READ ME FOR 20 FPS REASON]I included 20 FPS as I did a test couple months back that showed me that 20 FPS is the minimum frame rate you can be at with the GTA world still being in 100% sync. At all other levels below 20 FPS, the game begins to slow down at an exponential rate. I assume this is common knowledge as I see some servers requiring 20 FPS minimum to spawn, but if you never knew, well now you know why. And for the curious:

• 20 FPS and above: full speed
• 15 FPS: 15% slower
• 10 FPS: 73% slower

NOTE: Frame rate does NOT affect the game's clock in the top right for some reason, that remains in perfect sync, it's just the 3D world itself that becomes slower and out of sync. The slowdown of the game world cannot be fixed by bumping up the game speed settings either so no wasting time there. [/spoiler]

Results

Things that were insignificant:

Acceleration and top speed remained pretty much the same and should not be a reason for you to toggle frame limiter on for a racing server. In technicality, my results show that you do lose some speed as you go lower in FPS but the difference between 28.12 seconds for 60 FPS, and 28.30 seconds for 20 FPS from point A to point B is purely academic. 30 FPS fell in between at 28.17 seconds. This also held true when driving in sand. The results were pretty much identical and need not even be mentioned.

Collision force is another one I didn't really notice much change in. It's something that I know affects single player at very high frame rates (100 FPS +), so there perhaps is a difference there but I didn't really notice anything out of the ordinary at 20, 30 and 60 FPS, which would make any difference there an academic one.

Suspension properties didn't show any real observable changes that would make me fuss about it, so that's ruled out of the caring circle as well.


Things that did change:

Braking started to get weaker the lower the frame rate.

• 0.75 seconds at 60 FPS
• 0.81 seconds at 30 FPS
• 0.89 seconds at 20 FPS

It's something you will notice, especially the drop from 60 to 20 but I don't believe it's something to turn frame limiter on for. You have to consider, what is braking for it to be a factor to turn on frame limiter? These braking stats were tested from full speed to an absolute stop. That full length of braking is uncommon for any race you can think of so that's something to consider.

Reversing is another one that changed and is a lot more noticeable than braking was.

• 13.30 seconds at 60 FPS
• 13.06 seconds at 30 FPS
• 12.71 seconds at 20 FPS

The point however from braking also crosses over to this stat as well. What is reversing in a race to be a factor to turn frame limiter on? Certainly not winning most races by driving backwards, therefore I don't see the point for this either.


Handling

There is a difference in handling, a decently sized one at that but it was hard for me to find a way to quantify. At lower frame rates, you tend to oversteer more. At first I was wondering if it was due to differences in precision (the higher the frame rate, the better the sample rate, thus the better your precision is).

What I did to nullify potential errors caused by me was perform a handbrake turn. The handbrake turn was performed in the same position and at the same distance each time. The handbrake and the direction I chose to turn were held until the vehicle came to an absolute stop, then I photo evidenced the differences. I was driving exactly north each time and turned to the right. Sure enough, this method worked to capture what I was feeling driving around.

60 FPS

(https://forum.vc-mp.org/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2F7lUT4qO.png&hash=285b3f94d838d6861cfc4c44e610d65615752737)


30 FPS

(https://forum.vc-mp.org/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2FUsqb1h6.png&hash=d4dde682863dddff0f04d05994500e7c15ef2669)


20 FPS

(https://forum.vc-mp.org/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2FOQKQhyh.png&hash=1fc9b33bdae87eed4e2b6c49acda503b39401df2)

I didn't measure the magnitude of the angle shift that occurred for each turn but my guesstimate would be that the 60 FPS result was a 92 degree spin, 30 FPS was a 112 degree spin, and the 20 FPS result was a 135 degree spin. Believe me, it was much more of a hassle to try and pull off a U turn like this at 60 FPS than it was at 20 FPS.

So, if you had a race time trial setup where there are many turns and everyone uses the exact same vehicle with the exact same stats, the player with the lowest FPS may likely get the best time recorded. But not all races are like that, plus, I'd argue that the imprecision of lower frame rates may be a factor in nullifying the benefit of a lower frame rate.

Conclusion

So is it worth it to have frame limiter on? In my opinion, no, setting frame limiter is a waste of time. Acceleration, top speed, suspension and collision force aren't affected, braking difference is minimal and reversing is counter-productive for winning a race, period, so its differences hold no weight for it to be cared about. Handling poses the best argument to turn on frame limiter for a racing server, but lower frame rate impedes precision which I believe balances out the stronger steering. But it's up to you to decide from these results whether it matters.[/spoiler]


[spoiler=RAINY WEATHER]

The general theme of this one is that traction is reduced, but not all the effects of the traction setting are reflected. If you recall in the previous post, I stated that lowering the traction value causes increased braking times, understeering and reduced top speeds. The reduced traction from driving in the rain holds true to cause only increased braking times and understeering. Rainy weather in my testing DOES NOT affect top speed performance at all. Not even a little bit.

One major change however was speed in sand. You are noticeably faster in sand in rainy weather than in dry weather (5.48 seconds in rainy weather vs 6.2 seconds in dry weather).

Is that true to real life? Yes, due to wet sand clumping together to better hold its form. This ensures that as you're driving over sand and spinning your wheels, the wheels are actually pushing you forward rather than just making sand fly up and about in the air while it digs a new hole in the ground. So be proud to note that GTA Vice City is decent enough to account for this small detail.
[/spoiler]


[spoiler=Front vs Rear vs All Wheel Drive]

All my tests thus far have been on a rear wheel driven vehicle. Let see what happens when we switch things up using front wheel and all wheel drive.

Front Wheel Drive

No noticeable change in speed or acceleration, however it is noted that the vehicle seems to carry more speed coming out of corners. There's a slight speed improvement when driving on sand (6.14 seconds front wheels vs 6.25 seconds rear wheels).

Handling feels the same if not leaning towards a slight understeer but I'm pretty sure under a blind test you would not really be able to tell you're driving a front wheel drive vehicle by just this or any attributes I've addressed thus far. It does however come out of a drift quicker than rear wheel drive so its not a good setting for drifting vehicles.


All Wheel Drive

No noticeable change in acceleration, but top speed seems to have increased very slightly (28.01 seconds all wheels vs 28.12 seconds rear wheels). Very small improvement in with speed in sand over front wheel drive (6.11 seconds all wheels vs 6.14 seconds front wheel drive),

Handling for the most part is the same as what I've stated for front wheel drive except all wheel drive feels like it comes out of a drift slightly quicker than front wheel drive. Also, all wheel drive definitely does not like to take corners with anything called speed. To clarify, the test was doing 90 degree turns by tapping the handbrake and turning into the road. Rear wheel driving handles it well, front wheel driving handles it fine too but comes out of the corner with less speed loss. All wheel drive is pretty much asking you to stop to take the corner sharply in comparison to front and rear wheel driving.

[/spoiler]

---

That's gonna do it for Part 2. Doubt this can hold much more in this post with the 20,000 character limit and all.....so I'm separating the golden ratio as Part 3, plus its gonna take a whole lot of trial and error to have that one ready.

Also on the note, I'm not sure on this history of SLC, I'm new here, but I'm not doing this for any special treatment or special access. I have no aspiration for any of that jazz. My two reasons for pushing out help like this.

• Empathy - a lot of the help I'm seeing is advice driven. Nothing particularly wrong with that, it has its place & setting, but to use an analogy:
  
  trying to teach a baby how to walk by speaking to them won't help them get there if they don't understand what you're saying
  
  The baby is the layperson, the walking is the aspiration (to make a server) and the what they're not understanding is foundation behind scripting. It's the story of my dead end scripting life. Too many hows, not enough answers to the "dumb" whys.
  
  So for something like this, I try to do these long, unambiguous, winded, redundant explanations so that especially laypersons will understand without having to skip off the page to figure out what the heck I'm saying. It's what separates those who can make something on their own from those that have to copy everything they see/are instructed to do and hope & pray that it works.
  
  
• I've been apart of VC:MP for 8 years now, might as well add something to help my fellow members of the community

[spoiler=I didn't want to continue this off-topic, but seems like you just need some more]

Quote from: vito1 on Aug 03, 2017, 09:30 AMWhat kind of benefits do you expect for that? A colorized nick as for wiki contributor? Community runned by nepotism won't be progressive.

Here is your answer:

Quote from: Shadow on Aug 02, 2017, 07:50 PMany sort of appreciation.

---

"expect nothing" is a way of saying. It's more about moral appreciation.
All my post was about only respecting him for doing this.
"Do good (voluntary), and expect nothing in return. That's how you do a "good" for real.."
I bet you heard that at least once in your life.

---

Also, I got your point @vito1
But for your knowledge, I didn't ask for any appreciation for doing what I've done.
That "promotion" was done long time after my wiki contribution.

---

[/spoiler]
Instead of keeping this off-topic, I would just suggest you to cool down.
Keep the topic up.

ON-TOPIC
Didn't yet read the second part of the tutorial, but I've noticed your note:

Quote from: GanjaRas20 FPS is the minimum frame rate you can be at with the GTA world still being in 100% sync.

Never heard about that, but never believed that everything can still be ok at lower fps than 25. Good point.
I will come with edits if there is need. (after I read it all)

Is it possible to make car unmoveable/unrotable by Ped/player pushing via vehicle handling? (with no scripts)

Quote from: vitosca1 on Oct 09, 2017, 11:30 PMIs it possible to make car unmoveable/unrotable by Ped/player pushing via vehicle handling? (with no scripts)

Increase it's mass.

Quote from: NicusorN5 on Oct 10, 2017, 03:17 PM

Quote from: vitosca1 on Oct 09, 2017, 11:30 PMIs it possible to make car unmoveable/unrotable by Ped/player pushing via vehicle handling? (with no scripts)

Increase it's mass.

He knew it but just wanted to bump if I am not wrong. @vitosca1

Quote from: NicusorN5 on Oct 10, 2017, 03:17 PM

Quote from: vitosca1 on Oct 09, 2017, 11:30 PMIs it possible to make car unmoveable/unrotable by Ped/player pushing via vehicle handling? (with no scripts)

Increase it's mass.

It wasnt helped, even with x 1000 more mass I can rotate car https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42N7lpoqEoA#

@zeus, no.

GTA VC Engine bug maybe, If the mass didn't work, it may be handling and wheel stats. Adding'tank' flag to the vehicle maybe will help?

Quote from: vitosca1 on Oct 09, 2017, 11:30 PMIs it possible to make car unmoveable/unrotable by Ped/player pushing via vehicle handling? (with no scripts)

Yes it is possible, just set your vehicle dimensions high enough. Whether 30 or 60 FPS, it won't budge (I trialed with around 20 m each axis, 99% unmovable so I'm guessing 30 m onwards should do the trick 100%).

The reason why a mass change wouldn't work is because pressure is also a factor to work by. To keep it simple, basically when you apply a force to an object, the object won't move unless that force is being applied to a considerable amount of the object's surface area, say at least 20% for argument's sake.

With normal vehicle sizes, the player's surface area is lower but not exponentially lower than the vehicle's external surface area. It's probably in that 20% mark if not slightly more. So with enough force, no matter the mass, it will move.

In contrast, if there's an exponential difference in the surface area of the force being applied against the entire surface area of the exterior of the vehicle, that's when it's impossible to move. That's essentially why needles and knifes pierce through objects rather than move them. The force is great but its acting on just a small point, so therefore that point will rupture but the entirety of the object remains still. That's why higher dimension stats of the vehicle is the way to go.

Once you do that however, you'll want to use my trial ratios I gave previously to get the vehicle back to practical speeds when driving:

• 4 : 3 or 1.333 : 1 - acceleration : dimension
• 1.465 : 1 - top speed : dimension

Part 3 - Perfect Ratios

Sorry for the huge delay in this one. Been busy for those who were waiting but now I'll get into it.

Now previously, I had a trial ratio for acceleration and top speed for when you make changes to dimensions. For nothing, this effectively worked out well, except now your handling is still screwed. Upon my revisit to this I had a hard time getting the numbers accurate for extreme dimensional changes. I even ran into a new error which is noted below.

[spoiler=DIMENSION SIZE NOTE]
The game has a limit of 20 m per axis for vehicle dimensions. In my advice to vito, I expressed that I ran a quick test at this 20 m limit and that 30 m may give a better result. It doesn't appear to be that way due to this limitation.

The higher you go beyond the 20 m limit, the more physics flaws the game will introduce with the vehicle. Working off memory, the vehicle was able to be pushed with higher than 20 m dimensions and was becoming very impossible to drive. I didn't test it for long but the end result is your vehicle will fly erratically in the air if you go too high above the 20, in my case I went straight to 100 m.
[/spoiler]

There was also a huge limitation that forced me to go into another direction. After a certain point in dimensional size increases, it will be impossible to regain cornering statistics as the vehicle is too large to make any original sharp angled corners. It's size is going to always make it cover a large distance to make any turn, leaving the vehicle in a hopeless truck feeling state.

So my new solution was simply to work on the mass of the vehicle.

Recall in Part 1 that with increased mass, the vehicle becomes a lot faster and inversely, with decreased mass, the vehicle becomes slower. We can exploit this madness in VC physics to our benefit. So:

• For higher dimensions, you INCREASE the mass of the vehicle
• For smaller dimensions, you DECREASE THE mass of the vehicle

Since with smaller dimensions you gain more speed and acceleration, you decrease the mass which has a slowdown property, negating the speed gain. Inversely, since increasing the mass gets you closer to the speed of light, we use this to negate the increase in dimension which slows you down.

But by how much? Squared; ( n x n ) : n ==> mass : dimension

So if you increase the dimensions 2x, you're going to need to increase the mass 4x, 2 x 2 or 2 squared.
If you decrease the dimensions 0.5x, you're going to need to decrease the mass 0.25x, 0.5 x 0.5 or 0.5 squared.

The ratio isn't perfect but for convenience sake, this was within 5% error for me.

There's only one more thing to change and your performance should be near identical, centre of mass. This one is easy however, all you have to do is calculate the percentage of the dimension of the centre of mass against the vehicle's dimension per axis, and then apply accordingly to your size change.

So example, if you set your vehicle dimension from 2 m to 4 m on the x axis, and the centre of mass for the x axis was 0.1 m, then:


0.1 m / 2 m = 0.05 or 5%

0.05 or 5% in 4 m = 0.2 m


That's it, and you're done. Your vehicle should feel pretty close to original specifications with just these settings.

Hope this helps you out guys.