For the first time in 13 years, a YouTuber has found a solution to the taxi problem in GTA 4, which occurs after you install certain vehicle mods.
Maybe it's happened to you too: After a few years, you thought you'd give the cars in GTA 4 a nicer look with better textures. You install vehicle mods with new models and textures. But when you load them into the game, only one thing awaits you: yellow cars!
What Is The Taxi Bug?
This so-called “taxi bug” has become legendary in GTA 4 modding circles. No matter where you go, you will only find taxis and the occasional police car. Even some gang cars still appear. But apart from that, you can enjoy Niko Bellic repeatedly shouting "Yellow Car!!!". If you search the internet for a solution, you won't find any concrete answers straight away. Even better, even if you do manage to fix the taxi bug, there may be other problems either with the video streaming or the sound. After 13 years, a YouTuber named TJGM finally found a solution to fix both.
The central point of the whole problem lies in the "vehicle budget". This is the amount of memory that is provided for the individual vehicles with textures and models. When you load the game, pedestrians will appear from a group that matches the region you are in. These may also include vehicles you have recently driven, regardless of where you got them from. Most cars are less than one megabyte in size, and you can see about 66 different cars like this. If you drive to a different region of the map, cars will appear that have been adjusted to that area.
No More Taxis, Other Problems Instead
However, if you install mods that improve the model and textures, these are usually much larger than the standard vehicles and quickly exceed the budget of 40 megabytes. And as soon as you load the game, all you see are taxis, a few police cars and the occasional gang vehicle. It turns out that the game accesses a "fallback" that only allows the 25th group of cars to spawn when the memory is full: taxis.
You're probably thinking that you simply have to increase the vehicle budget. And you're partly right! If we increase the budget with a utility program, normal cars will appear again. But there is a problem: the game now loads many more types of different cars, which leads to audio and streaming problems. For example, you can no longer hear your engine when driving and there can be delays when loading building textures.
The Solution Is Surprisingly Simple
TJGM experimented with all these problems and the code and realized that the vehicle budget of 40 megabytes is about half the size of the vehicle index. And so his suspicions were confirmed: If you were to install high-resolution vehicles and thus increase the vehicle index to, say, 200 megabytes, simply set the vehicle budget to 100. And it works!
Although he is sure that better solutions will certainly be found now with the discovery, he still gives tips that you should follow if you want to make everything error-free. If you've always wanted to know how to play GTA 4 with 4K vehicles, here's the guide for you.
Did you also want beautiful vehicles in GTA 4, or do you just love yellow cars?