Custom Hoods - Map Additions

[deadplaya]

On 3/4/2022 at 1:29 AM, g1zmo said:

if somebody interested:

 

When people ask to remove certain objects/buildings to add residential areas and other stuff instead of them, I think that's a pretty fair request. People who know the GTA V Los Santos map well also know that HD versions of South Central and East Los have their own number of problems, which creates not the most pleasant conditions when it comes to RP there. 

 

For example:

1. Scale in general. Unlike GTA SA LS, where we had a fairly small city, it still had a lot of streets, roads, dead-ends and spots, which created a sense of real scale. In the case of GTA V and specifically South Central, we actually have only a couple of main roads, which are very wide and take all the free space away. Just count how few streets there are in South Los Santos if you compare it to big brother.

 

 

 

2. Infrastructure. Don't get me wrong, but when I drive around a city on the West Coast, where it's always sunny and palm trees are mixed with gangsters everywhere, I definitely don't expect to see such a huge number of factories, abandoned businesses and industrial buildings. Just take a look at the Rancho, or Cypress Flats. You feel like you're in some kind of Detroit. If we go back to GTA SA again, we can take Willowfield and El Corona as examples. There was a huge dump and quite a lot of industrial buildings, but they never created a problem, because in the first place of these areas was the creation of residential infrastructure (apartments, housing projects, swap meets etc.). GTA V lack of all this and honestly has a lot of useless/unused areas. 

 

 

3. Compressed and missed areas. For me, the main advantage of the GTA SA map was that with such a small size, old Los Santos contained almost all the districts of Los Angeles, which made it possible to show the game of a particular gang as accurately as possible. Like Ganton = Compton, Jefferson = Watts, El Corona = Lennox, East Beach = Long Beach, Idlewood = Inglewood etc. In the case of GTA 5, there are many areas that are a mixture of several real neighbourhoods at once (Rancho - Watts + Florence, Strawberry - Inglewood + Crenshaw, Davis - Compton + Slauson), and some are not represented in the game at all (Long Beach). This is often the reason why players create factions in areas that are not created for gang RP (Vespucci Beach, Morningwood, most of the Mirror Park, etc.). It becomes very crowded with time and players literally have to fight for a COUPLE OF HOUSES.

 

So.. I actually agree that South LS and East Los better should be expanded, overhauled and maybe even gentrified at some places. This would greatly improve the immersion in the atmosphere, for which everyone is here.

 

This mirrors exactly what I feel about GTAV's map too. While San Andreas' Los Santos is smaller, the game was built around gangs and gang warfare. A lot of different hoods had representation, while West and Central LS were condensed instead. Now, the city's much larger but South LS especially feels smaller and less diverse than San Andreas.

[yekim]

On 3/5/2022 at 12:49 PM, Biskit said:

I can't help but agree completely with what Mario has written here. I see that there also were a lot of allusions to performance impact if these mods were to be added to the game server and I think that the possibility of that happening is certainly there depending on how many external objects load up at once. What Mario said about sacrificing one neighborhood landscape to get another makes perfect sense. It just seems pointless to me to go into this blindly and so I'm against this whole idea FOR NOW.

Maybe in the future the LS-RP mapping team with a little optimization could make some dope mapping like Coconuty did back on SA-MP. Safe to say that this idea in general shouldn't be excluded nor forgotten about but for now we shouldn't be thinking about this at all.

I've heard things from other GTA V role-play communities where their players are saying that the GTA V map is really huge and I think so too. With the little experience that I have with GTA V (only singleplayer) I've gotten lost so many times and couldn't memorize the map because of how big it is. My head was spinning. It is noteworthy that I'm talking here about a community with 1k+ players daily online and the city itself still feels really empty.

So I solemnly suppose that nobody here would avail anything prior to actually seeing for ourselves what the LS-RP playerbase will look like. We need to first see if the city will feel dead or alive to us with the amount of people that will be playing LS-RP on day-to-day basis. If the city feels dead then there's no reason to be adding additional neighborhoods, the only logical assumption that I can think of on why the average role-player would want custom mapped neighborhoods under those conditions is for aesthetic purposes. I think that we should just be patient for the server launch and then shed light on this topic once we've checked the server out ourselves.

 

the performance worries stem from people not knowing the difference between server streamed objects and DLCs. the YBN map has no impact on server performance because its a purely client-side addition, and if its made to similar R* quality in terms of topology it won't have FPS issues either. it's a DLC RAGE forces your game to load before you play - that's it. on the other hand, typical mapping should be avoided as much as possible because the performance costs on RAGE are way heavier - you can't get away with spamming hundreds of objects server-side like you could on SAMP. on World there are notoriously laggy businesses that can't function if like 50-100 players enter

 

as for the map? while big there's not much variety at all. east LS is nearly all industrial and u dont really get the feeling you did on SAMP. i really do think sprucing up these areas by expanding residential houses into removed/revamped industrial zones would benefit the server immensely. parks, schools, public housing and projects would add so much to the atmosphere and would only require people to download a DLC once when they launch the server

 

people will see (especially gangs) that rping next to 7 factories with nothing nearby is pretty boring unless like previously stated they move into historically incorrect places just to get better amenities 

Edited March 6, 2022 by yekim

[g1zmo]

15 hours ago, trouble.maker said:

This mirrors exactly what I feel about GTAV's map too. While San Andreas' Los Santos is smaller, the game was built around gangs and gang warfare. A lot of different hoods had representation, while West and Central LS were condensed instead. Now, the city's much larger but South LS especially feels smaller and less diverse than San Andreas.

Yeah, simply because GTA V main goal was not an attempt to portray gang life on the same level as GTA SA. That's the reason why areas like Vespucci Beach or Rockford Hills have way more details and actually feel like their real prototypes. But it would be fire to see updated neighbourhoods, for example with restored details of GTA SA map (like Willowfield, El Corona and East Beach parts instead of most of the industrial buildings at Cypress Flats, La Mesa and El Burro in my screenshots above, Ganton, Idlewood and Jefferson parts at Davis, Strawberry and Rancho, etc.). Even just nicely expanded hoods will be enough already, I guess.

Edited March 6, 2022 by g1zmo

[GangsterPhantominity]

Highly populated areas should be kept vanilla as much as possible for performance reasons. Texture loss and lag is bad enough with simply the amount of players in those areas, no need to make it any worse with map mods. 

[La Tweaker]

As much as map additions would be cool, factions/gangs should fill up the areas that already exist first imo. There's plenty of areas across LS, not to mention that IRL, gangs aren't limited to South Central. There's gangs from Hollywood to Venice Beach irl. It'd be cool to see some West LA inspired gangs being made in West LS, or oldschool Hispanic gangs in El Burro and the surrounding areas

Edited March 26, 2022 by La Tweaker

[La Tweaker]

On 3/4/2022 at 9:29 AM, g1zmo said:

and some are not represented in the game at all (Long Beach). This is often the reason why players create factions in areas that are not created for gang RP (Vespucci Beach, Morningwood, most of the Mirror Park, etc.). It becomes very crowded with time and players literally have to fight for a COUPLE OF HOUSES.

just to correct you, gang rp does indeed fit in Vespucci Beach, but Long Beach Gangs don't fit there. Long beach gangs would fit more in Cypress Flats or somewhere near El Burro Heights, because that area is geographically based on Long Beach.

[g1zmo]

11 hours ago, La Tweaker said:

just to correct you, gang rp does indeed fit in Vespucci Beach, but Long Beach Gangs don't fit there. Long beach gangs would fit more in Cypress Flats or somewhere near El Burro Heights, because that area is geographically based on Long Beach.

Yeah, my bad. I know that there are a plenty of gangs near the real Venice such as Venice 13, Shoreline Crips or Culver City. Just wanted to say that I find it a little bit weird when people create gangs like Longos or ABZ with LB vibe, but using pretty hipster Vespucci as their hood. That’s the reason why revamped Cypress Flats and East Los would be fire

Edited March 27, 2022 by g1zmo

[La Tweaker]

Just now, g1zmo said:

I find it a little bit weird when people create gangs like Longos or ABZ with LB vibe, but using Vespucci as their hood. That’s the reason why revamped Cypress Flats and East Los at all would be fire

Yeah, this is pretty much what Ive been saying. IMO gangs like Longos and ABZ dont belong in a place like Vespucci, for example alot of these LBC themed factions end up claiming 'Eastside' ICly because their real life counterparts do, when in reality they're literally on the westside. Which is why in my opinion, custom mapping is needed but only in areas like East LS and Cypress Flats (as a start atleast)

[elpolloloco]

It would be cool to see some mappings around East Los or right outside LS, because there is a HUGE amount of HOODS in LA County, Orange County, the valley and the Inland Empire, you can have some nice mc clubhouses just right outside LS or hoods as well that can be hella active and also beef it with people in LS.

In LS you got only two or three hoods, you got that long street in Lester's and the one that's next to it, those can be one or two hoods. And right in front of the one around the tattoo shop, you got a little suburb-like hood most people don't roleplay at but it can be used tbh.

[g1zmo]

On 6/1/2022 at 1:34 PM, elpolloloco said:

It would be cool to see some mappings around East Los or right outside LS, because there is a HUGE amount of HOODS in LA County, Orange County, the valley and the Inland Empire, you can have some nice mc clubhouses just right outside LS or hoods as well that can be hella active and also beef it with people in LS.

In LS you got only two or three hoods, you got that long street in Lester's and the one that's next to it, those can be one or two hoods. And right in front of the one around the tattoo shop, you got a little suburb-like hood most people don't roleplay at but it can be used tbh.

The idea of turning areas like Sandy Shores and Paleto Bay into something like San Bernardino, Lancaster or any other town from SoCal that have gang problem potential really sounds cool. But I think there will be a lot of conflicts among the players, where some people will ask to keep the atmosphere of a "desert half-dead town", and others will be fine if these areas will turn into more developed and reasonable towns, where in addition to rednecks and bikers you will be able to meet classic street gangs.

Edited June 2, 2022 by g1zmo

[La Tweaker]

On 6/3/2022 at 4:18 AM, g1zmo said:

where some people will ask to keep the atmosphere of a "desert half-dead town"

those will be the same people asking us to abide by GTA 5 lore and only roleplay lore gangs, fuck what they say.

[Strike12x]

I do think there should be custom areas/complexes but I think we should not have so many maybe like one or two in in the south,east,west,north just so the server doesn't have complexes everywhere you go.

[KillSwitchh]

South LS kind of has enough hoods, there is more areas that could be removed to make room for more hoods such as the oil fields in east LS.

 

[Ese Reaper]

29 minutes ago, KillSwitchh said:

South LS kind of has enough hoods, there is more areas that could be removed to make room for more hoods such as the oil fields in east LS.

 

Needed. The server definately has the funding for this project, it should be invested into this. Bump!

[Matthew_Garner]

Yeah, these map additions would be cool and I am in support of having more custom mapping. Especially replacing the Mega Mall with those projects to provide more room for a faction to pop up. However, only if they can find a way to optimize it well. As long as it can be optimized, I wouldn't see an issue with adding more cool mapping like this.