SRTT Vehicle and Variant lookup

Well, that's nice, a quick extracted and summarized table of the .xtbls for variants.
I kinda wish you'd put down what's changed in each variant (it's a lot of different mods for parts for each, so it'd be a lot of pure ugly work sorting)... but this is handy.

Shame though it's not the actual internals. We still need to crack the encoded binaries of each car variants/etc.. then we could use this data as more than a quick lookup to know what the weighing tables are (that we can't really utilize).

Besides, I have the nasty suspicion that the game doesn't seem to understand variants for most functions and uses default weights always. Gang spawning sure doesn't force it..
 
Wow. That is.. a lot of stuff. I applaud you for the effort to sift through hundreds of files to get all the stuff, and sort it out.
Or did you just write up a parsing script? ;)

Either way... the next step now is finding how this ties into the binaries so we can figure out how they're put together, and thus change them.

I wonder how the names are actually used in-game (in SR3 at least).. are specific mission-created vehicles the only case where it uses a given variant, and just goes into randomized the rest of the time? I'm thus wondering if it looks up by the variant name, or the number.. because some parts (gang vehicles for instance) look for a specific name only and refuse to accept anything other than that, and yet the actual spawning seems to just use default weighting.. and they are given IDs...

I'm no good at LUA. Anyone know if the game calls up a vehicle by variant ID, or by name, in the scripts?
 
I'm wondering... because some times the game doesn't pay attention. People became convinced the game was NOT spawning gang vehicles randomly in traffic. The game was, but it's hard to see because they always use the default weighting, meaning they blend in with normal traffic. You can tell if you add unusual vehicles like the choppers. It seems then that the game ignores the variants.
Except, well, when you pick the actual gang vehicles, it uses an xtbl list. The problem is while each of those has a <variant> tag, the game engine ignores that flag (or something), and assumes the saints variant without fail. Thus if you add a car to the list which lacks that specific name, it fails to load the car, leaving it blank, and the game won't let you select it (as keyboard locks out temporarily, and mouse can't be used to confirm using it). In turn, you can only add vehicles with that specific named variant.

What I'm wondering then is since the vehicles are not only named variants but given a variant ID number, does the game load them by variant ID in the missions and scripts? I'm poor at LUA but best I could tell the assumption of the variant is something handled in-engine and thus can't be fixed. But if we knew the scripting, if the missions only care about the ID number we could change the name of a variant for a car, and thus the missions work fine, but the gang customization could select them too (and then they'd drive fine, as normal vehicles anyways in traffic). Of course it's probably caring about variants more directly, and never even uses the ID number, and thus it'd be a matter of actually creating new variants into the game to be the working vehicles. That'd be possibly doable with the lookup tables you made, if it read the xtbls, but without being able to decompile the binary variant tables and then go from there, it's probably not gonna get too far in the real game :(

Of course, the game doesn't even use that either when you call up saints reinforcements and so on meaning it lets more variants be picked... so who knows.

The game is weird. Things like this or the lack of dynamic time being related to some times of day just inexplicably removing spawning... makes me think they hit crunch time and had to give up all the fun stuff they were almost done.. and then ended up hardcoding stuff to make it half-work, and hide the seams. :rolleyes:
 
I actually think the variants are loaded by variant name, but because the gang vehicles have to be selected through a menu they have created a file to do that, but hardcoded, and since, for example, only standard infuegos are spawning when you dedicate that car to the saints, they probably have forgotten to add the variant tag in those files. Only logical reason to me why all other variants load flawlessly.
The Saints cars in missions will spawn in that variant because those cars are probably loaded through the script of that mission, having the Saints variant.

They had a year more than they had for the development of SR2, if they used the character system of SR2, player and npc having the same rig, skeleton, etcetera, and let the engine create all the different outsides (clothing, body, hair) instead of making a different mesh for every npc, they would probably have had more time to finish a whole bunch of the things that are now hardcoded. Then I was finally able to create more variants for cars probably, it's one of the crucial things in a Saints Row Gang, and seeing that my counter already hit 7, aside from the syndicate... -.-
 
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