Must read | About installing VEHICLE and SCRIPT mods

Reyser

Hello guys! @GanjaHouse and I had in mind to share our knowledges about mods, so here are some and you can take them in count when you're going to install vehicle and script mods

`VEHICLES:` TEXTURES

A lot of vehicles have a texture called "No Damage Lod" or something similar, which resolution is 2048x2048 with a ARGB8 compression format. If you want to save a bit of game memory or reduce its performance issues, do the next with every vehicle:

.- Export it from the YTD file of the specific vehicle with OpenIV program. Do it with DDS format, or your texture will lose quality!
.- With a good image editor, resize it to 1024x1024 keeping the ARGB8 format on it.
.- Put it back to the YTD vehicle file.
.- Done!

Using this way with every vehicle your game will waste less memory while using them. If you're having memory errors, this may help you to keep them away for more playing time (It depends how much Add-On or Replace vehicle mods are you using while playing).

Do you want more information yet?
Here's a much more detailed explanation about Texture Compression used by the game -> Texture Compression and Mipmaps

`VEHICLES:` LODS

First, if you don't know what mean LODs, here's a "short" definition:

LODs (Level Of Detail): "Involves decreasing the complexity of a 3D model representation as it moves away from the viewer or according to other metrics such as object importance, viewpoint-relative speed or position."

In other words, if you're close to a vehicle, its quality will be higher than if you're not.

There's a common problem with them. Some vehicle modders don't add LODs to their models or their quality is not enough, and some of them choose to edit some specific values of the vehicles.meta lines the specific vehicle uses to keep them in HQ. It means that your game will load them directly with HQ LODs even if they're are far away from your character position, translated to a LOWER GAME PERFORMANCE.

What can I do to fix this and get a better performance?
There's not a way to fix it, so you'll need to choose what to do:
.- I want the vehicle and I don't want it to disappear when we're not close to it: Then left it as it is, but it can cause performance issues and maybe your game will become unstable.
.- I want the vehicle and is not a problem for me to see it disappear when its not close to my character: Then you should edit the vehicles.meta data of the vehicle, finding similar lines to the next ones and replacing them with those (are vanilla game values):

<lodDistances content="float_array">
    15.000000
    30.000000
    60.000000	
    120.000000	
    500.000000	
    500.000000
</lodDistances>

.- I don't want the vehicle anymore, my game stability is more important: Good choice, you're a real expectations gamer. You prefer a good game with less mods than a good but unstable game.

Do you want more information yet?
If you're a vehicle modder you'll find this very useful -> Setting Up Vehicle LOD Models Properly

`VEHICLES and SCRIPTS:` UNINSTALL SOME?

Probably you like all your installed mods (for some reason you've installed them, right? ), but I'm sure most of them are unused and just wasting game memory and HDD/SSD space. Maybe is your turn to remove them?

I'll put myself as example here. A few years ago, I had like 500 Add-On vehicles installed and I've never used more than 5 or 6 each time I played GTA V, just the most liked ones. Why would I want to have 500 Add-Ons then?

I got rid of all of them, and later did a new install of the ones that were performance-friendly (which means that such vehicles have well made LODs and a good overall vehicle quality). From 500 I went to 30 to the date of May 26, 2019. After that and until Dec 21, 2022 I kept adding vehicles as their quality and standards improved and wanted to use some different vehicles depending on my gameplay style. Currently I have like 200 vehicle mods, all of them with full LODs, correct in-game names, engine sound audios, etc.

Then, thanks to removing that big amount of vehicles and installing only those which are really optimised my game loads faster and the performance hit is unnoticeable. NOTE: All my vehicle mods are Add-Ons! No replacers.

Talking about Scripts, in my case I've already removed the most unused or bugged ones, so I just kept the most necessary/used and my game performance is as it'd be with the default game

I'll never recommend to install mods like SPA (Single Player Apartments), Open All Interiors or Benny's Motorworks SP by Guadmaz to say some. First ones because their performance hit is impressive (in a bad way), and the Guadmaz one because it's outdated and it will cause bugs to your game (use the I'm Not Mental one instead or don't use any at all).

Please, be careful with the kind of Scripts you'll install to your game. They're the responsible of most of the game crashes.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

You're free to help me improve this thread sharing your knowledge or help others, @GanjaHouse and more awesome people did already helping me modding .

FoxtrotDelta

@Reyser thank you

GanjaHouse

thanks bredda

JCM

@Reyser said in [TIPS] Vehicle and Script installed Mods:

ugs to your game.

Very good tips...

@Reyser said in [TIPS] Vehicle and Script installed Mods:

you should convert it to Decimal

That is probably better if it says "you need to convert it to an 8-bit number, which is a value between 0 and 255."

It's the 8-bit part of the number that determines the actual value and that can be Decimal, Hexadecimal or Binary.

Reyser

@LeeC2202 Done.

And yes you're right, I just thought wasn't necessary to add the "8-bit number" as it doesn't seems a relevant information for most of the people that just add mods to their game, but I always like to be rectified if I'm wrong or I missed something, so thank you