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Comment by jonplackett | Hacker News Reader

I remember when GTA 3 came out on PC and I found just a simple human-readable text file you could edit to modify all the settings for all the cars.

We turned the Karuma into a physics defying monster. It was 1000x heavier than the tank, so as you drove down the road other cars just bounced off and flew over the horizon, or exploded on impact.

Yet it still did 0-100 in 0.1 seconds and could drive up walls.

One time we jumped it from the third island, over the middle island and landed on a skyscraper roof on the 1st island.

From there we spent about an hour dropping grenades on police cars and the army who had no way to reach us up there.

Fun times. Shame Twitch or YouTube didn’t exist back then to tell anyone about it!

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You would probably be pleasantly surprised with how easy handling modifications are in GTA:V.

The handling meta files are all XML now, in more or less plain English, and very well documented by the modding community.

I run an GTA:V multiplayer RPG server using FiveM[0] and the community around vehicle mods is really incredible. 3D modelers produce all kinds of real-world vehicles for GTA:V from Nissan GTR’s up to hyper-accurate law enforcement Dodge Chargers[1] with accurate Whelen lights, Setina bull bars, etc.

[0] https://fivem.net/ [1] https://redneckmods.com/product?id=3fbaf24e-7775-432e-87e1-f...

Haha, you weren't the only one doing this. I used to alter the fire engine to also have some absurd weight but and engine powerful enough to still move it. Their was also a time scaling option somewhere which would slow the game down and put it into a "matrix"-esque mode.

I used to jump into the fire engine, get on the wrong side of the road on a freeway and activate the slow motion before driving head on into the traffic. Their was something mesmerising about smashing your way through the cars and seeing them lift off into the air and fly into the buildings on either side of the freeway.

Eventually the police would show up but what could they do against a fire engine that was as dense as a sky scraper!

Yes now I remember the time changing too! That was so much fun.

Another fun thing I now remember was to turn the dampening on the Taxi’s suspension to a positive value, so if you even gave them the smallest possible knock they would gradually start to wobble like a jelly and then start bouncing and bouncing until they were leaping up higher than buildings.

If I remember correctly the file called "handling.cfg" and it was a huge unreadable CSV table :) good times.

Yeah that rings a bell!

Really couldn’t believe my luck when I found something so obvious (I still felt like I had mad hacker skills)

Yes. It was a csv table with all the configs for physics engine for all vehicles.

Not exactly CSV but close. The good thing is now you get to see the...less than optimal code that reads this file: https://github.com/GTAmodding/re3/blob/master/src/vehicles/H...

Yes ! I have a similiar memory. When I was a kid, My parents did not like me playing the game for many reasons, one being the in game prostitutes . I simply changed a file to have them removed .

We modded an SUV to have monster truck tires. It allowed you to drive over passenger vehicles like speed bumps.

Opened this thread expecting to share this fond gaming memory. I've wished that modern games was more like this more than once. Finding jumps for crossing entire maps was incredibly liberating!

> We turned the Karuma [...]

It was Kuruma, in Japanese it means just a "car".

haha, funny, and thanks for the correction!

I remember raising sea level in San Andreas.

Weapon damage was also controllable. I accidentally discovered a hack I used in the multiplayer (MTA mod) that made me receive 0 damage from non-projectile weapons.

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