I never really imagined any of this would actually happen.  Creating something as big as this was never planned or intended, I just wanted to play as a cop in GTA, and with the help of my really weak programming knowledge and the .NET scripthook began working on it.  It was really bad, it was buggy, it was horribly coded, it only did a few things, but it was still somewhat revolutionary.  Just being able to call for a backup car, despite how terribly coded that feature was, was a complete game-changer in itself.  Sure, you could get the police uniform, use police-like weapons, drive cruisers and do vigilante side missions, but to take it one step further and actually give the player the ability to call backup was, in my opinion, the defining feature of this mod at the time, and one of the most significant developments as far as police car/ped/script modding goes.  SA-MP had undoubtedly put police car modding in GTA on the map in a big way as you could go on-line, join a roleplay or cops and robbers server, and be whatever sort of cop you wanted to be.  You had the super-realistic on some of the bigger roleplay servers and the plain crazy on CrazyBob's and it was this sort of thing that really got people modding their police cars, and spawned things like GPM, with BxBugs leading the way.  GTA IV didn't have this though, the most you could do was the Cops and Crooks multiplayer mode, which sucked.  There were a few vigilante missions and chases and that was it.  I really doubt that without something special to get the ball rolling, police car modding would have been nearly as big as it is today, and that, I think, is where LCPDFR came in.  It, for the first time ever, let you play as a cop, however you wanted to play, in single player.

 

Obviously, it became quite clear that the mod was taking off and around that time, I set up the first version of the LCPDFR website, hosted on, believe it or not, my uncle's shared hosting account at xgweb.co.uk/cops (maybe someone has a picture of it?!)  At that point in time though, the website was simply that: a website.  It was pretty crappy, using some horrid HTML template I found and just contained a bunch of static pages which sucked.  Even still, things kept on growing, and then sometime in late 2009, Jay and I met in school and became pretty good friends, I showed him it, and he set up the next version of the site which used Drupal and had user accounts and a shoutbox, etc. with the GTA IV skyline background that some of you might remember.  It was fine, but still pretty boring I suppose, so at some point in 2010, we moved to Invision Power Board, and introduced a forum for the first time.  For the first year or so, the forum wasn't really the most active place in the world and the most used part of it was easily the downloads section to download LCPDFR (there wasn't really anything else to download, lol).

 

Everything changed, however, shortly after the summer of 2011.  GPM had, until that point, been the place to go for everything police/fire/EMS modding related.  It had some of the best modders around, like Lt.Caine and Bxbugs, some amazing texture artists like FOwner and gfxle and a bunch of guys from GTA SA like Boo, Matthias and 05Bowtie.  At the time, I was also on GPM, with Caine and Bugs as the deputy directors of the site, with Caine and myself playing a large part in the actual day-to-day management of the site.  It was, as you all will probably remember, the golden era of GPM and of our modding community in general, with all of the top authors in one place, with the largest member base.  Anyway, one week I went to Paris to see some of my family who had moved there, and when I was checking up on things at GPM, I noticed AlecDurbin had been up to no good, provoking and abusing members like normal.  I was pretty annoyed with him (and the French summer heatwave didn't help matters either), so I issued him a pretty stern warning, and he basically came back at me, in public, saying I would have to ban him if I wanted him to stop.  He got his wish. A few hours later, I see his ban was no longer in the database, so I simply re-applied it, and then another few hours later its gone again.  I couldn't really be bothered checking it out, so I just banned him again, and then bam, I get banned myself - it seemed as though daedaelus and Mike Garber (as they call themselves), along with a few others, hadn't taken too kindly to me enforcing the rules against Alec, and were all pretty pissed at me.  I told them to piss off, then I got accused of stealing Lt.Caine's ERP SA-MP script (obviously I did no such thing), and banned.

 

At first, it was hard to tell what direction things were going in.  I was in Paris and had to wait a few days before actually looking into the whole situation that was going on.  It seemed I wasn't the only one that was fed up with the politics over at GPM though and slowly but surely, more and more people started to leave, such as Lt.Caine, their public relations director and some of their other staff.  Jay and I decided that perhaps it was time to offer an alternative to GPM, so we did just that, opening up our downloads section to everybody and promoting it.  This was the start of LCPDFR.com as you know it today, and the rest, as they say. is history.  Our site grew massively, to the point where we completely and undeniably overtook GPM as the largest site of its kind and grew into what you see before you.

 

Regardless of the weird journey this site has had, it has been an amazing ride, and I'm just so happy that everybody seems to like it as much as we all do.  I've done my very best to make us unique, friendly and different.  The staff team are putting in enormous amounts of efforts (NicolaiB has sent more than 50 personal messages this week alone as part of his work) and we're all just hopeful that this astonishing growth will continue.  100,000 members anyone?

 

 

I remember that time. That was right around the first public prereleases of .95, right?

Now that I think about it, I wonder what my life would be like today if I did not have lcpdfr and the GTA community in my life. 

i would be bored to tears had it not been for lcpdfr

And imagine if R would have done the game - and do in their next games - like the Arma series developers, enhancing the modding support...

Who remembers this?

 

 

 

Well the most amazing thing that I have experienced within this community is how it's changed my life. Not the mod LCPDFR itself (the only thing that has changed is that my mom thinks I have 100% no life because I play it all the time...), but the people! I mean, I have 8000+ subscribers on YouTube who love LCPDFR! It's been such a fun and fantastic time! I've had the front seat to all this. Being a commentator I get to see the expression's that our viewers have!

 

Not only that, LCPDFR staff team has been fair, and kind. I mean everyone slips up, but as Sam said... this has been going on for many years.... I was shocked it has yet to fail itself, but what I realize is that out of ALL the modders that have thrown in the towel, Sam, Jay, NB, all of them have yet to do that.

Edited March 16, 201313 yr by STARTairsoft780

 Sam, Jay, NB, all of them have yet to do that.

 

Don't forget people like LMS (created advancedhook), Lil-rich...they aren't so well known compared to other modders but contributed heavily to this project and how enjoyable it is (:

...Sniper296 (who picked up the towel, and became a dev not too long ago)...

Some things I thought seeing that picture:

* Dark theme - I remember when you switched to a light theme, and GPM kept a dark theme. It seemed pretty reflective of the two sites.

* The plan in that post to give better access to people who donate - I'm really happy you didn't follow through with that.

* Dark theme - I remember when you switched to a light theme, and GPM kept a dark theme. It seemed pretty reflective of the two sites.

Yeah, I saw it that way as well, although I just wanted a change considering the change the site was going through.

* The plan in that post to give better access to people who donate - I'm really happy you didn't follow through with that.

Me too.

Who remembers this?

 

 

I remember that the dark themed site