Dynamic Addon Vehicle Traffic Injection vs Popcycle Addon Vehicles
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Hi, not sure if this will get answered, but what is the general view on mods that dynamically inject addon vehicles into the game vs mods that place addon vehicles inside popcycle.dat? One particular dynamic addon spawner that I have tried is this one. This mod uses ScriptHook .Net to dynamically inject either vanilla/addon vehicles into traffic.
What is the general consensus on the stability of these two different types? By nature, is one more stable than the other? Or are they equally stable? And do addon vehicles contribute to general instability when doing story missions due to how the game works? I've noticed quite a lot of crashes when using dynamic traffic injection, but I have not tested popcycle addon traffic because it requires more knowledge of modding which I don't have. So that's why I'm wondering which method of addon cars spawning in traffic is better.
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Alot of addon vehicles will inherently cause stability issues when you start replacing ambient traffic with them, as they are mostly higher poly than the standard vehicles with insane texture resolutions and the games engine is just not designed to handle that sort of data.
Both methods will likely produce similar results.
Stick to well made models with reasonable polly counts / texture resolutions and correct lods and you will have less issues with stability. These vehicles tend to be made as replace, but that is not always the case.
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So they should technically be the same? If the instability issues are simply caused by the game engine unable to handle that much data, then is there a workaround fix like a polygon count reducer and LOD maker? Or is this simply the case of 'too bad, find another vehicle'?
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@Eingenvector Well the script method will be spawing in a new car and replacing by deleting a naturally spawned vehicle the popcycle would spawn anyway. Its just a text file with some car names for specific areas.
So id say a script would be more of a drain.
If you want to replace a large number of vehicles, how well these vehicles are made is going to be the deciding factor on how many. A well tuned gameconfig is going to be a must too.
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I see, seems like the engine is just too limited and 8 years old by this point, I guess the best thing to do is indeed just look for well made addon cars with reasonably less polygons and LODs.
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Adding traffic via poproups is infinitely more reliable, as all you're doing is adding more data to select from during a process that the game is already doing. Traffic injectors like added traffic work in parallel to the existing traffic, and require additional resource to read and spawn the vehicle data when the script requests it. On highly strung machines or heavily modded games this can result in noticeable lag spikes as resources are directed towards the un-natural vehicle spawn.
Both methods can result in crashes if used incorrectly. The most common mistake (and one that I made myself for a while) is adding vehicles that do not have (or have unsuitable) LODs included. If you get multiple vehicles with no LODs spawn in game then you can get a memory overflow which will result in a (seemingly random) instant crash.