To put it quickly, an SA version would be impossible.
The strain on the engine is just too much. Sure it would work, but at an unplayable state I would think.
I think that the VC engine is the better decision, mostly due to the undiscovered powers of this engine.
Anyways, it's good to see that X-Seti still has an update in line,
especially since the lack of community support.
It saddens me that a mod of this greatness and potential,
was just laid to waste by a huge modding community.
I tried my best to help, yet I'm still a mediocre modder.
People are more bothered in car mods than a huge map mod that desperately needed a team.
It's for VC - who cares? It's amazing that X-Seti got this far by himself and the potential here is great.
But one man can only go so far and I guess this is it.
Some people may think I'm over reacting, but this guy spent these last few years working on this,
and for what?
Well done X-Seti, I only wish I could of helped you more :cookie: :cookie: :cookie:
Some community this is...
Thankyou mate.
Here is something to remember;
I started this mod just after SA was released and was being researched (End-2004-March-2005), from the start I only wanted to know how much the VC engine could handle, in the way of having bigger maps with more vehicles, and know what was possible in the way of limits for future projects.
And I was not going/planning to release anything really from the very beginning, it's only when I got permission from R*, Motivation and free time, I finally with the help of Andy I got something released (SA-LVCbeta01.rar 17Sept2004) This was VC and LC only, with the plan to add SA in time.
I have released many betas and versions up to 51.1, where we now have a totally stable map.
Many tweaks and hacks to the exe was released for the game exe, by myself and Andy, but these in the last year whore never finished due to Andy quiting modding, on the upside SOL supports 3 times as many vehicles and has twice the object capacity of GTA_SA.
We can have bigger maps SA engine, 70% of the dff models are RW3.4 thanks to Steve M's RWA tool, this means that the mod is able to run on the SA engine.
For those who wanted the SA version, There has been many problems to address and the reason why GTA United will not be able to have all 3 cities on one map.
I have worked on the SA version of SOL for 2 years, but I found that the SA engine is very limited in how fast data can be read from the img files, plus the amount of data in the IPL, IDEs entires, without re-compiling the engine I see no real way to bust this problem.
When I started on the VC version of SOL, this also ran very slow, given I had a 1.8Ghz Dell desktop at the time with a crap GFX card, So Adding SA 3 year ago would have been a knightmare.
I have a Custom built Quad Core 3.2Ghz machine now that can run the VC version of SOL like a dream, but the SA version now still is very slow for me and right now is un-releasable.
SA has a lot of issues when it comes to storing large amount of data in the img files, one thing being the most noticeable is lag, 2fps in same cases depending on the city your in, where not many people will be able to run the game.
SA can crash when you have to much spawning on one place at once, there is a spawn object limit that cant seem to be removed.
Paths are the biggest issue for SA, as it is impossible to spawn paths way beyond there original map bounds, the problem noted above added to this problem also, where the engine just crashes anyway.
This is where I dropped the SA version, and fell back to VC, where I did get paths spawning way beyond the map bounds be only in the East and South regions of the map.
I never got around to doing the radar maps as this was never a priority, but the water table issues have been fixed with a temp fix, if I get around to it, I can now add paths to the rest of the maps, but I have never been that good at path mapping and there isnt a tool for this with SOL, given the map size.
Update more soon.
