despawning has been a thorn in our sides since the last game. I get that they need to monitor memory usage, but wow it's REALLY aggressive. I know in FC3 I took the camera and set a waypoint at some jeeps and dead pirates and then chugged a ways away before turning around, zooming in an slowly walking backwards. In that rather unscientific test everything despawned at just over 100 meters (maybe around 120-ish can't remember) and that was with me actually facing it.
My "thoery" on fixing some of this (none of it tested yet):
In all of the cargo truck entity files (CargoTruck.Convoy, CargoTruck.Mining, CargoTruckKyraTea, CargoTruck.RohanBrick, etc.) try setting the following entry from false to true: <field name="bIgnoreEntityLimiter" type="Boolean">False</field>
(hopefully this doesn't create some kind of memory leak or problem with delivering the truck - if it even works)
and / or
The file A2586CDDFA2E936B.maybe.rml has some really interesting bits that talk about vehicle despawning:
<Generic disLibItemId="9015014834272499" Name="Default" hidGUID_Legacy="{9F3D35A5-3438-48B4-92A8-74F9EF14BCDD}" hidSingleObject="1" bCanBeShared="1" hidName="Default" hidKey="753088835" bShowDebugInfo="0">
<VehicleSpawners fVehicleAvailableCheckRadius="5" fVehicleDespawnAliveMinTimeOutOfSight="12000" fVehicleDespawnDeadMinTimeOutOfSight="1" fVehicleDespawnMinDistance="10" fVehicleDespawnCheckFOV="90" fVehicleDespawnCheckMaxDistance="100" />
<PlayerDamage fPlayerDamageMaxDistance="20" fPlayerDamageMaxHitPoints="10" fPlayerDamageDecayPerSecond="0.1" />
<EnemyProximity fEnemyProximityMaxDistance="20" fEnemyProximityDecayPerSecond="0.1" />
</Generic>
Note the FOV check is set to 90 meaning indicating to me that probably when you turn your head and the vehicle is out of vision it can poof out of existence.
fVehicleDespawnAliveMinTimeOutOfSight is set to a really high number (12000)... so not sure how that works. Is it seconds? Frames? Meanwhile despawndead is set to "1" so... dunno what the relevance of these are.
The most telling value in there (to me) is fVehicleDespawnCheckMaxDistance="100" which sounds like 100 meters to me.
In terms of spawning in your vision I had upped the encounter distance to 100m (fEncounterSeparationDistance="100"),but that is still well within your vision range especially on open roads. This was to spread the encounters out. The default game had them at much lower numbers which really exacerbated the problem... maybe I should try upping them to 200 where in most cases they would be so tiny the effect would not be very noticeable. The only foreseeable problem here is it will create distance between random patrols and random civilians so the net effect is you come across less
(*personally I don't mind that AT ALL. Kyrat is VERY congested for being a huge mostly unsettled wilderness. In Far Cry 2 if you avoided checkpoints you could drive halfway across Africa before passing an enemy patrol LOL. Several people however have commented that they wish there were MORE enemies however so this likely wouldn't help in that direction)
