Can you install 1 million addon vehicles?

JohnFromGWN

I crashed my game two nights ago. Have to admit it doesn't happen often. Did I scream to myself "Damn SH5"? Did I start tweaking my values in gameconfig.xml and packfile limit adjuster so I could aspire to have 128 GB of VRAM when my card only has 8 just by pumping up the values in a text file? Did I combine my 1,000 installed addon vehicles into one pack?

No to all the above. I knew there was a cause and effect. This means that the very first question you should ask yourself after you (yes you, or me in this case) crash your game is "WTF did I do now to crash GTA 5".

The answer was I had just added 5 new cars. Now I"ve added over 1,000 and I only recall 1 i had to uninstall, so that's a failure rate of ....uh...let's see divide by 1000, carry the one. Hold on let me get the calc....ok, it's 0.1%. Not even 1% failure rate and by that I mean a car I failed to install.

This time I had 4 of the 5 cars (going back to install individually) that failed and the math wizs will know that's 80% failure.

How did I fix this? Simple. I just disabled all my other cars and all 5 new ones loaded properly although I had to spend 10 minutes each in Menyoo putting back the fenders, roof, and chassis parts that the mod creator just hadn't thought of doing at spawn. Finally, I created a third top level folder for my cars and named in Cars3.

So back on topic. Can you have a million cars installed. No, but you definitely can have thousands. And here's how.

You organize your cars by folders and subfolders as deep as you want. Then you simply rename the top folder or subfolders and they won't spawn. This is why I just had to rename Cars and Cars2 to stop all addons from loading. Had I wanted to just to stop my Ferrari Super Cars, I could have because they have their own folder.

In other words, you can turn addons on or off, group them however you want, and never have to worry about crashing and all this without having to touch dlclist.xml (although you could comment out lines there if you wanted).

Now since I hate doing renames manually, I started by writing simple command/batch files to rename folders. Then i graduated to a VB dot net DLC selector, not only for cars but for everything in my DLC folders.

Here is an example of the code to check on startup if a specific DLC folder (or subfolder) or even a specific vehicle, will load. In this example, my folder Cars2 (I currently had 3 top level car folders, each with about 20 subfolders), goes through a check. When it is disable the name becomes [NO]-Cars2 (prefix can be anything) and dlclist.xml will ignore it.

Private Sub Cars2(sender As Object, e As EventArgs) Handles Button4.Click
       
        If Directory.Exists(GTA5ModPath & "\DLC[NO]-Cars2") Then
            FileIO.FileSystem.RenameDirectory(GTA5ModPath & "\DLC[NO]-Cars2", "Cars2")
            Button4.Text = "Cars 2 DLC Enabled" : Button4.ForeColor = Color.Lime

        Else
            FileIO.FileSystem.RenameDirectory(GTA5ModPath & "\DLC\Cars2", "[NO]-Cars2")
            Button4.Text = "Cars 2 DLC Disabled" : Button4.ForeColor = Color.Red
        End If

    End Sub

P.S. Same approach can be used for FiveM where your resources, for example, could be in [cars1] and just renaming that folder will keep server.cfg. From an organize POV you can also have multiple config files. Just link them like this:

exec Scripts.cfg
exec Vehicles.cfg
exec etc.....

Bonus: By having your cars in different subfolders you will have different paths in dlclist.xml which means you can have cars with duplicate folder names (in different folders ofc) without having to rename them in the data folder in OpenIV. However this only works if the spawn names are unique - if they aren't unique you will have to rename the yfts etc but not the folder.