Speed Racer

I figured I'd come here to gain more context from more experienced players on the matter instead of going straight to a rule suggestion post. The core thought I'm having is as follows: What issues, if any, would there be in letting players who find dead bodies/witness someone die RP remembering the situation in general? I only have around 3 months on the server, and it's all been spent on my civilian character working his way up the LSC ladder and recently starting a street racing crew with some friends, so I have limited context of the life of an LEO or bonafide Crim. However, speaking solely from my experience on this character, it feels like character development is noticeably limited by being forced to forget witnessed deaths. Obviously we shouldn't be remembering names of people since they're obviously still very alive, but the mere act of witnessing a death and the scene of it feels like something that should be remembered by our characters for the opportunity to develop. Let me share an example that prompted this thought: Last night I pulled into LSC's employee parking to find a co-worker's dead body and his killer injured next to him. We RP'd out the scene and got the murderer taken away and arrested. Based on the character I play (a gun-phobic civilian who gets generally anxious around deadly violence), a scene like that should have a lasting effect, especially since I had to provide BLS for the murderer. Due to NLR though, I feel my RP is unnecessarily limited. Given the fact that LSC is almost always hiring, it feels plausible that the dead mechanic could have just been a new hire that I hadn't met yet. Given the fact that this isn't a suggestion post, I'm not really looking to see +1s and -1s, but more so players sharing their experiences as to why the current wording of NLR is necessary or maybe more experiences like mine where the wording of NLR unnecessarily hampered their RP. Thanks for your time!

Yeah, now they just do this. Script shouldn't be used to enforce rules against a targeted subset of the playerbase who allegedly break a rule often, especially when the script affects something literally everyone uses. Let the proper channels be followed when players NRP. Also crazy that the inconsistency of being able to use your phone but not your radio seemingly doesn't bother you.

+1

Massive +1, frustratingly inconsistent realism in the script as others have pointed out. Can fiddle around with your phone but can't hold a button on your ear and talk? Bonkers. Solution isn't to remove phone use as the medic job would get ruined, just revert this update and tell people to go to forums when NRPing radio changes during shootouts.

We put on quite the show for SD!

Awesome job making official folks, hope to collab more ICly in the future. Always good interactions!

+1

Baxter was born into a racing family in Europe. All the men on his dad's side of the family were heavily involved in motorsports of all disciplines, from open wheel series to endurance GT to rallying. If it had an internal combustion engine and at least two wheels, a Verstetten had probably raced it somewhere in Europe at some point. Baxter was karting in Europe when he turned 5, but was no standout racer at the time. When his parents split, he went with his dad to Liberty City where he finished his primary education and attended Liberty City University, where he earned a Bachelor's in mechanical engineering. Upon graduation, he got an internship with the North American branch of the Pfister factory racing team. If you ask him, he'll tell you he's a factory driver for the team and races overseas, but he's really just a test driver for their R&D team every few months. Baxter came to the city knowing exactly what he wanted - to be a mechanic and represent the racing prowess of Pfister. It wasn't long after he got his job at LSC when he overheard one of his supervisors, Matt Smithe, talking about racing around the city. He was still struggling to make real friends in the city, but worked up the courage to ask Matt to show him some tracks some time. To his surprise, Matt kindly said yes, and the education began. Over the next few days, Matt and his fiance Niki showed Baxter around the most prominent tracks of the city. It wasn't long before Baxter got tired of using a loaner from Matt and convinced the Pfister factory to import him a comet to drive around the city. This car became his pride and joy. Before long, Matt started floating the idea to Baxter about getting a more concrete group together for racing. Baxter was still riding the joy of finally finding some friends he felt like he vibed with, so he of course chomped at the bit to help however he could. Matt proposed the idea of willingly running a speed camera at over 180kph and turning yourself in as an initiation process for Recruiter and up and invited Baxter to join him and Niki as the first members to accept the process. Accepting that street racing is going to come with its inevitable run-ins with the law, Baxter guardedly accepted to ruining his squeaky clean police record that night. This is where Baxter met Jason Steel for the first time, but that's an essay for another time. It became apparent to Baxter that the Comet just couldn't keep up on most tracks around the city compared to the overly abundant Elegy Retro Customs. He fought hard with himself over his brand loyalty, but seeing as how getting a Neon or a Comet SR would take an absurd amount of time to save up for, he swallowed his pride and used his remaining savings from the Pfister internship to bring an Issi Sport into the city. Having this car that handled so vastly different from the Comet and had such a different reaction to upgrades from LSC made him curious though. The mechanical engineer in him began thinking - what do the upgrades in this city actually do to our cars? With the help of Matt and his vastly larger collection of cars, they went out to the airport for hours at a time over multiple days, making trips to and from LSC swapping out upgrades to test how suspension and turbo options actually affected cars. This was the first large project undertaken by Baxter under the name of the group, and he happily shares the invaluable data with any member of the group. His next big project was laying out his own track, something in the city he could attach his name to. He drove up to Grapeseed where he thought he'd have a blank canvas - "Nobody's come up this far North to race before, right?" And thus the track "Grapeseed" was born. It wasn't long after introducing the group and his friends to the track that he started hearing about folks who have been in the city far longer than him having driven this track back in their primes' though. While the track seemed to be a hit with everyone he introduced to it, he was no longer satisfied that he'd found a unique track to attach his name to. He continues to explore the roads of the city on the lookout for the next big track. After weeks of work with Matt and Niki, acting as a sounding board for them and continually being on the lookout for potential new recruits, the group was finally ready to start looking for a place to settle down and announce their plans with the friends they'd gathered so far. A hangout was chosen and plans were announced. The next day after a few hours of friendly racing, Matt and Niki pulled the group aside at Observatory to officially invite Baxter to be a Lead Racer in the group. He was overjoyed at the time, and couldn't be happier to have found a group he truly calls his family here in Los Santos.

Let's GOOOOOOO

There is a similar post not too long ago about electric cars in the city that was a good start to what I want to say, but I'd like to combine those thoughts into one post while fleshing out more of my own in an effort for more exposure. The referenced post is the following: Obviously we already have a host of electric cars on the server, but they don't act as electric cars should, and I feel they deserve their own flag as Xoza mentioned in a comment on that thread, in order to have more defining characteristics to them besides their lack of sound, ans possibly some scripted options around the city for recharging. Let's start with what I feel might be easiest to implement - the ElectricCar flag. As mentioned in that thread, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense that electric cars have to fill up on fuel like regular vehicles. In order to not mess with fueling costs or options while also making it more realistic for electric vehicles, some edits could be made to cars with this flag that lets them "burn fuel" slower than regular cars (I'm not entirely sure what would be balanced here, but I'll spitball the number 75% of the regular rate just to get the ball rolling), but can only "fuel" to maybe 50% of the regular fuel tank capacity. This would have the effect of making them cheaper to operate while also reducing their operational range - much like real life. This unfortunately doesn't address the issue of how long the action of "fueling" takes, but I'm not sure if that could be handled with this car flag. Another defining characteristic of electric cars is that they can't stall. I'm aware how much potential this change would have to change the "meta" (In parenthesis because it's weird to think of a meta in an RP server but too many of y'all care about winRP to ignore the fact that there is one), but I have a few proposals to keep things balanced. First, damage could start affecting car performance at higher numbers than on regular cars. Instead of engine sputtering starting around 300-500 as it currently does, damage to the car could gradually start degrading fuel efficiency or "enginepower" (an actual flag already in the car files) at a specified rate until it hits 0 and won't move. Maybe even consider having electric cars blow up if they hit 0 to simulate battery casing failure, I'm not entirely sold on that idea though. Regardless though, it has never made sense to me why electric vehicles can stall (this was brought to my attention when I was racing the golf carts over the weekend and stalled multiple times from collisions with tire barriers while moving <10kph!) Next let's talk about possible scripted options for these cars around the city: Currently I see two options - 1, modifiy how gas stations interact with cars that have these flags, or add separate charging stations in parking lots throughout the city. I'm not sure how much work it would be to implement either of these options, so I have no particular preference or suggestion for either, but the logistics are straightforward to describe though. For option 1, the pump could check if the car has the electric flag or not (or maybe utilize the /refuel vs. /recharge command suggested in the previous thread), then fuel at a slower rate and cheaper price if the electric option is chosen. For option 2, the charging stations would essentially function the same as gas pumps that only work for cars with the electric flag. Maybe add in the option for businesses to charge to use them, or just let them be a gift from the city for choosing eco options. Again, no preference here, just listing options in the hopes that at least one fits into the RP goals of the city commissioners. I'd like to note for this section though that I realize the scripting of this will likely take a lot more effort from the devs than creating, modifying, and applying the general flag to the proper cars. And it's because if this that I'd like to place a lot more emphasis on the 1st portion of this suggestion in an effort to see quicker results. The changes made in the latter half of this post can be looked past RPly by imagining or /me'ing plugging into the charging stations while at gas stops and complaining ICly about how expensive electricity is in the city, while I find it really hard to come up with IC ways to describe why my electric car has stalled or why I get the same fuel economy as my buddy in his muscle car. I'd like to think I understand the plights of the devs when reading these suggestion posts and always try to make/describe my suggestions in as feasible a manner as possible from a coding standpoint. Thanks for reading, and I hope to hear any and all feedback!

+1 Prison is an OOC punishment which makes incredibly harsh policing IC bleed into OOC resentment. Fixing this issue could help reduce OOC toxicity towards police.

-1 OP seems to just have an outdated PoV of the situation at hand that's causing them to misunderstand the core issue. As a current mechanic at LSC, everybody is trained on tow truck as soon as they're hired, and as long as there are at least two people on duty at the shop then at least one person can go out and take MRs - and are expected to. If the ledge is slammed with only 2 people on duty, they will probably prioritize clearing the line before heading out in a tow truck. If your MR is on top of a mountain or in a river in the middle of the map, you can expect longer wait times for a couple reasons - 1, nobody likes climbing mountains offroad in tow trucks, and 2, LSC mechanics have to wait a certain time to take MRs North of a certain point to attempt to respect Bayview's jurisdiction. Which leads us to the most prominent of your misunderstandings - the issue is not a faction cap, because we can barely hit a cap if there even is one. The supply of jobs at LSC outweighs the demand of them. If people think they'll have fun RPing a tow truck driver, feel free to come work at a mechanic shop and get through the first couple promotions until you can finally be 90% tow truck based. But it's clear that not enough people on the server have an interest in that kind of RP to allow your idea to work either.

+1

Definitely sounds relevant, I didn't have any passengers for this though.

I bought my phone charger pre-phone update and it worked fine. Noticed today that my phone was getting close to dead even though I plug it into my car every time I'm in it. The /charge command would always say the phone was already plugged in when I hopped in my car. I tried doing /unplug and was going to plug it back in to see if that fixed the issue, but now my charger isn't in my inventory and was not on the ground where I unplugged it. Really not sure what caused this, but I think I gave all the relevant details here to help devs figure it out. Going to buy a new phone charger now I guess.

I think it would be really cool to allow mechanics to have the ability to properly tune a vehicle that's brought to them by making more precise edits to the vehicle files, namely in the handling department. Here are a few provisions I've thought through, and potential issues that I'm not able to thoroughly think through as just a player: First and foremost, I want to dispel any fears that I'm asking for the ability to give vehicles an extra ton or two to make them ramming machines. All proposals here are aimed at realistic modifications one could make in real life and to hopefully reduce some of the unrealistic aspects of car mods that we currently see on the server. I don't see the need to touch anything with overall engine power since that's already covered well enough by IC purchase options. The following handling settings in the in-game files are just a few that I propose the ability to change; All numbers involved with "wheel traction attributes" vecCentreOfMassOffsetX, vecCentreOfMassOffsetY, and vecCentreOfMassOffsetZ These can technically be altered by body work and the in-game suspension "upgrades," but the idea behind being able to mod these settings is like adding ballast to the cars. Also, while the suspension changes let you alter the CoM on the Z-axis, that also seems to come with a negative effect on top speed for cars in this server, which I hope to mitigate here. fBrakeBiasFront Potentially some of the Suspension Attributes, but I haven't personally delved deeply enough into the files myself to figure out exactly what each of them does to confidently recommend any here. The UI and general method for implementing this has numerous paths it could take. The two easiest options I see right now are as follows: Make them customizable at the discretion of the mechanic. In this scenario, the player would give the mechanic a general description of how they want the car to handle and let the mechanic player work out what's best to fit the customer's request based on an easily-digestable reference sheet made available to them. (Drawback here is that it's just more for mechanics to learn in their training) Hard code specific values as sliders in the /modview menu for customers to choose. This puts the onus for doing research on the customer. It should be noted that no matter the solution here, there would most likely need to be a new /mechoffer option that doesn't include any parts costs and only uses labor costs as there technically aren't any parts being added to the car. There is also the issue of fine-tuning a car that could become unreasonably burdensome financially when making incremental changes. Obviously even with these being the only files we edit, some silly things can still happen if certain numbers are put in. I'd be happy to help advise or provide the resources I use to the dev team to help ensure hard limits are put on these so trolls can't go making their muscle cars stick like glue to the pavement, or modding a faggio to be a roll-risk. Potential positives for this on the customer end are pretty limitless, but some notable examples include: Letting people have actual drift cars (push the CoM forward a bit, reduce the minimum traction, etc.) Letting street racers fine tune their cars to their liking (play with the brake bias, move the CoM around to induce different weight distributions, etc.) Give an actual use to off-road tires (reduce their base traction, but reverse the effects of driving on different surfaces so they gain grip when going off-road.) I'm really interested to hear from potential flaw or exploits people see in this idea as laid out so far so I can workshop it and hopefully give the dev team as little work as possible and encourage them to implement something like this. I'll end with a fun fact for those who have taken the time to read this to the end - you might notice I left out changing the mass value of the vehicles. This might sound unrealistic if I'm asking to play around with the CoM by adding/removing ballast RPly, but the reason for this is that total mass has no effect on performance and only affects the results of collisions. If a tow truck had all the same stats as a Comet SR except for its mass being notably larger than the comet's, they'd perform exactly the same. The only difference would be that the tow truck would win any ramming competition against the Comet thanks to its extra mass. So if we went and added extra mass as a bye-product of changing the CoM, we'd be making cars collide very different to how we already expect them to.

Great point. The air space over the main city should probably be a no fly zone if that's the option most people agree with.

LSIA (The big airport south of the city in case that isn't obvious) is what I feel to be the least utilized area of the map, yet one of my personal favorite areas to frequent in vanilla. I have two proposals that could possibly give it a great jolt of life. Organized, legal racing! If we're not going to use the airport for flying, then it's wide runways and winding connector roads make for a great canvas of multiple track layouts. Any motorsport enthusiast knows how many great tracks irl started as old WWII airfields. The devs could either provide stock track layouts that change at regular intervals, or possibly let someone run the "track" as a business and design their own track layouts per event; who knows, I'm just spit balling here and maybe some of it sticks. All I know is that I'd love for some kind of racing to be implemented into the server that isn't the illegal kind and could force me into prison RP down the line Some kind of flight courier service! I listed this as number two because I'm not a huge fan of how bad the economy is for the current courier services and more competition would just make it even worse I fear, but legal flight (or any flight? I'm not even sure I've seen a flying vehicle yet period) is something I also feel is lacking in the server. Maybe some way to earn a pilot's license like you do your drivers and trucking licenses. The limited number of airfields on the map could be another downside of this option, as variety in experiences may be limited, but smarter people than me could probably think of better ways to spice this up. Regardless of which option is more favorable, I hope more than anything that the community at least feels this common longing for more use of LSIA!

I'm not sure what you all think, but I know us truckers are tired of the cut-throat competition for paultry wages. It ain't right! Most of our job is taken up sitting in these smelly, rented trucks just waiting for some schmuck to post a job for us, and when it's posted we're looking at 30-60 minutes of driving for what, an average of $1k? And that's only if you were the quickest on the draw for taking the job! We're OVER it! How many fellow truckers will band with me and stop taking jobs that pay under $3k? How many fellow truckers also want to stand with me in demanding the city open up ordinances on how many businesses are allowed in town so we can see more business ourselves? We need change! -Baxter Verstetten