Non ELS Carcols Unknown Settings

Hey everyone, 

As GTA V has now been out for...my goodness SEVEN YEARS now, the community has come a long way it the development of modifications. Among those being lighting modifications such as ELS. Many people use this modification but now with FiveM and FivePD being as popular as they are, most are using Non-ELS vehicles for servers and now even just single player. I have been in the GTA Dev world for many years and when we first started to discover things about the Carcols file, that we could make custom patterns with 32 bit ints, and be able to use the games own engine to our advantage, we were hype. What a time. There is a lot of documentation on the Carcols file and more than most will probably ever need, but me being me, there's still some things left unanswered (at least for me anyway). 

• What does the lightgroup value pertain to? At first I thought that this might be for changing the type of environmental lighting that was emitted or the texture per say but I don't believe that is the case after testing.  
• How does the speed value differ from the BMP value? It seems as though the SV is a percentage of the BPM and only effects the light in the speed that it flashes, not the pattern itself. 
• How does the start value effect the pattern and what are its uses in an actual pattern if we can just set a light to be off with our binary? 
• Where is the Carcols settings defined? Where is the code that takes these declarations and puts them into action? For example; Say I have this line in Carcols:  <lightGroup value="0"/> Where is the file that is telling the game what that means? Where is it defined at?

Those are some of the questions I have and I am currently digging into files and researching trying to find any information. It seems that even the old forum pertaining to Carcols had just speculated about these settings and were never really pursued up to a point. So, if anyone has any documentation on these, that would be absolutely great. I am not sure if these are even useful in the long run but who knows, maybe they will be. Id like to imagine that the "<lightgroup value = ""> " could be used to group lights together and given them a separate BPM all together but again that's just speculation and hopefulness. Again, thanks for any help and being one of the best communities out there. 

Best,

Steven

Edited February 17, 20215 yr by stevenew95
adding more bullets