popgroups and popcycle, what's the general rules of what works and what doesn't

[r0llinlacs]

I'm modding my popgroups and popcycle files but it seems the more I do, the more I run into crashes.

I tried changing general in_veh peds and it caused crashes

I'm trying to add more variety to the ped and vehicle population, but what models are usable? It seems I run into crashes trying to add story models or some cutscene models to the general population. Is this correct?

The population density also does not change. I've got the 5x peds/vehicles gameconfig, I upped the pedestrian and vehicle caps in popcycle and also the percentages and nothing changes. Vehicles can sometimes get dense but peds are still scarce. Even reducing the bird population and compensating the other categories doesn't do much if anything.

Also trying to add a different group of peds via popcycle doesn't work. If I want a certain gang to spawn around a certain other gang, I have to add the ped models via popgroups to get them to spawn. It seems like nothing I change in popcycle works. Changing percentage of cop cars does absolutely nothing. I can put it at 100% and still see no cops. It's been 5+ years since I modded this game and popcycle edits always worked, I never had to edit popgroups to get my desired results.

I've tried searching tutorials and what-not but they all seem just as clueless as me but pretending to know everything. Where is good info for modding the game yourself? I just want to add more variety to peds and vehicles, and bring some online vehicles to single player.

edit: I kinda figured out my problem. I was doing too much crazy stuff like trying to spawn tugs in boat traffic which was causing the crashes. And my popcycle and popgroups edits didn't do anything until I increased the PedVarietyMultiplier and VehicleVarietyMultiplier values in settings.xml. 1.7 seems to work, above that seemed to crash.