All my game peds disappeared - destroyed by Lambo
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Posting this here in case it happens to anyone else. Has a happy ending but still unclear as to the actual mechanics.
Here we go. I'm in SP and using my personal menu I spawn a car and a few addon peds. Then I spawn a vanilla ped (Lost MC girl) through my menu and I get a script exception error - no spawn.
Hmmm. Strange. Look at the code in VS, everything looks fine which is expected since no recent changes were made. Decide to spawn through Menyoo trainer this time and I get nothing. Try another model. Nothing. No game peds will spawn, but all addon peds spawn as expected. This is an "Oh Fudge" moment.
I search for game models in Open IV, restricting search to Mods folder only, and they appear - they are there!
Ok, let's not panic because I'm religious when it comes to backups. Go into OpenIV and I extract the 2 files that I've updated lately. One of which is dlclist.xml. I delete my update.rpf file and restore it from backup. Launch GTA 5, everything is restored, everything works perfectly but the last addons won't appear yet because i need to update dlclist.xml.
So I go into OpenIV and copy dlclist.xml and the other file and restart the game. Peds don't spawn! This is a WTF moment. Time to inspect those files. I open dlclist.xml and it's all good. Next I open the second file, a file which i NEVER update yet I did this time. The file? extratitleupdatedata.meta.
And what do I notice, the addition I made to it, right out of the mod creator's installation instructions, is full of unnecessary spaces which obviously were not parsed or ignored. So this simple edit error resulted in all my game peds (from the Mods folder ofc) no longer spawning.
Now I know the veterans here will roll their eyes and say you don't need to update that file. And this was the first time I ever did - because the author had several extra steps which I stupidly believed were necessary. I never update this file, in fact I never even follow instructions - the only reason I open the instruction file is to see if the spawn name is different from the folder name.
Moral of the story: backup your update.rpf and other files, don't update extratitleupdate.meta and if you do make sure the tags are correct and free of extra spaces.
<Item type = "SExtraTitleUpdateMount"> <DeviceName> dlc_lp700r: / </ deviceName> <Path> update: / dlc_patch / lp700r / </ path> </ Item>This is the code that broke my update.rpf file and resulted in game peds no longer spawning thru C# or Menyoo.