Find Which Car Crashes GTA 3, Vice City or San Andreas

A modder asked me via my YouTube channel what he could do to fix his game. It was crashing about every 5 minutes when driving on the streets.

This is usually because of a faulty car mod but which car was causing the error? It must have been a car which crashed as soon as it spawned in the traffic.

The exact problem with a car can be a lot of things. The reason is usually human error rather than a bug. Here’s how you can get closer to the solution.

Find the Broken Cars

I suggest saving at Verdant Meadows because that’s quite an empty area. For each car you changed, do this:

  1. Spawn one car at a time.
  2. Write down each car that works.
  3. When the game crashes, write down the car you tried to spawn.
  4. Restart the game and repeat this for other cars until you did them all.

Fix the Broken Cars

Now make a backup of your current handling.cfg file.

Now get an original file and replace all the cars that crashed.

Frequent backups are a good idea when you are pushing the limits of the game. ;)

Restart and Re-test

Try spawning the cars which crashed. If any still crash, you must have changed some other file and that is broken.

You could adapt the advice from my multiple installs of GTA tutorial so you always have an original copy of every file.

San Andreas probably puts all your saved games in the same place. If you use map mods make sure you don’t save over your original game saves!

Cars Inside Garages

If a garage is crashing the game just as you open it, it usually means the car inside is corrupt. The saved game sometimes keeps bad data if you modded a car badly, so the garage crashes the game even after you fix the cars on the street.

You can delete these cars from the garage by using a saved game editor.