Frequently Asked Questions about GTA 3 & Vice City Handling

Tired of people snapping at you because you ask about something which they think is simple? Want to set cars up to be lowriders but no-one wants to help you? Well, this is the tutorial for you! It covers the basic techniques I employ for making general alterations to vehicle performance and fixing problems.

Lowriders

The most requested mod is to make a car lower to the ground. There are two approaches to this. Change the Lower Limit to be close to zero and then halve both the Suspension Force and the Dampening Force, or you do it properly and use my CFG Studio handling editor to calculate the settings.

Leave the Upper Limit set to whatever it is, then change the Lower Limit to about -0.05 to give a ride height of 0.05m (5cm). The next step is to decide how stiff your suspension should be. I recommend calculating this using the Tools > Suspension Helper in CFG Studio.

Bouncy Suspension

We have all made it happen. You are driving in a nice straight line but your car is bouncing back and forth like it is trying to hump the road. Simple to fix - your suspension is too stiff. This happens because:

Simply alter the relevant values to suit. If you find your car slowly rolls or pitches to extreme angles when cornering, accelerating or braking, your Damper Force setting is too high. Make sure you have the decimal point in the correct position.

Basic Suspension

This is the most complex tab in the whole handling setup. The below values will give a reasonable setup to most normal vehicles:

My Car Scrapes Along the Road!

This tends to happen when you do not import a car over the model it is meant to go over. The reason it scrapes - even when you make the Lower Limit very low and it does not look like it is scraping - is because the collision boxes that make the car solid are set at different levels for the different models. You can cure this by using a collision file editor to move the boxes for that model higher off the ground. Or, simply install the car into the slot it was supposed to go over in the first place.

Your car will also scrape along the ground if it uses Dmagic1’s Wheel Mod but you have not installed it. Install the wheel mod and the problem should be fixed.

Basic Traction Settings

This seems to trip a lot of people up. Traction Multiplier should be set with care. A value of 1.00 will be like your car has racing slick tyres. The maximum a road car should have is about 0.90 from my experience. A sporty saloon, like the Sentinel, should have around 0.80 using my style.

Traction Loss is important too; it is the best place to set power delivery from the tyres to the road. A small difference of around 0.01 between Traction Multiplier and Traction Loss will give a very stable car that has lots of grip and is rather boring. A difference of about 0.15 is more common. Overpowered muscle cars might have a bigger difference.