First off, let me say that LCPDFR is probably the best mod for any game that I've ever seen. It's incredibly fun, has tons of replay value, and really breathes new life into GTA IV.

This post is essentially what happened when I tried to install and play this mod. Could be helpful to some new guys, I don't know. It's probably long compared to other threads here.

Anyway, my experience got off to a rocky start.

I installed the mod - no errors during installation. Try to play, gets to the black loading screen and stays. Research this for 15 minutes, find out you need a fresh save. Delete all my old saves.

Loaded the game. This time, it loads! So, I complete the mission where you drive from the dock to the safehouse. Go outside, hit Alt+P, run to the police station. So far so good. 3 minutes in, I pull someone over and the scripts crash. Researched this for half an hour. Found out this might be caused by a car addon, which I had. Since I consider myself an experienced gamer, I keep backups of original files if I'm modding. Doesn't matter if I'm playing the original Roller Coaster Tycoon or Sim City 4, whatever, always backup the original file. Transfer that back in. Load it up.

Works fine - until I go to the character select. It freezes up. Wouldn't let me select a character. Wouldn't let me move. Went to the ` menu and did reloadscripts, which worked. Tried to go back in, didn't work.

Give up for about an hour.

Decide to try dsound instead of xliveless - wouldn't even load the game.

Update xliveless to the latest version - bingo. This time, I was able to play the mod without problems.

So, I decided to try to make it much more realistic. I got the ELS mod, plus a vehicle pack (ultimate hd car pack) which claimed to be compatible with LCPDFR. Cue a whole bunch of other problems.

One thing was it seemed my world was overrun with taxis. As I had a previous vehicle pack - I already had the fix for this (trafficload.asi) which worked.

Then I noticed was roads and buildings not loading properly. They would eventually load, but it took awhile, and I ended up crashing a lot before hand. I also starting having problems with the character and vehicle select again. If I made it as far as pulling someone over, the scripts would stop working again. Research this for a little bit and find a solution for the roads and buildings - I forgot the name of it already, but it was a shader package I found on this forum. Not only did it fix the building problem, bit made the game look a lot better and run smoother.

The problems kept happening, though. Upon some intensive research, I found that any mod to the law enforcement vehicles -may- cause problems, so, unfortunately, I removed the very beautiful Ultimate HD Car Pack. I wasn't giving up on ELS, though. I thought it was neat being able to do random things with your lights. So, I found some modded original emergency vehicles - the only thing that was changed with them was ELS compatibility.

Loaded them in. Fired the game up. Played for a few minutes. Scripts crashed.

Some more intensive research led me to find that ELS -may- be causing some problems. So, I removed ELS and reloaded the original vehicle files.

But before I loaded the game back up, I still wanted more... I found Braveheart's Policing System here on this forum and thought it'd be worth a shot.

Installed that mod, fired the game up.

After all of that, I just successfully completed an approx. 2 hour gaming session with no game crashes, no script crashes, and no missing buildings or roads. All of the Alt+ and Ctrl+ commands worked, as did the F9-F12 commands. The Braveheart System commands worked wonderfully as well.

I don't know what ultimately fixed my woes with this mod, but I can say it was well worth the effort.

Anyway, I also use the simplenativetrainer, which doesn't cause any problems... As long as I turn it off before going on duty. Maybe I should disable the shortcuts so I can run it all the time?

Long story short, I am extremely pleased with this mod. I am also impressed with the amount of help you can find on this forum - just by doing simple searches. That just proves this mod has a great development team, and an excellent fanbase.

If there are car packs that don't interfere with LCPDFR, let me know! I'm all about pushing GTA IV to it's limits.

Thanks a lot for this mod. It's almost too much fun.

/tl:dr

glad to hear that :)

and what i like.. you really did some research and some google instead of creating a topic of questions that was answert 3000 times befor. :D that makes you very sympathetic xD

Edited August 16, 201213 yr by taximan5

Yeah, I can't stand when people ask for something and don't bother to look. It's the internet, chances are it's already happened hundreds of times before..

I'm messing around with some car mods again, just to see what works and what doesn't.. I've yet to find one that's completely compatible.. :-/

I had a similar experience, with trying to add mods, but all the issues were how i was installing them, after several install attempts, i realized to do a clean install, clear all saved game data, and them install each mod seperatelly i was able to see what would and not work for my setup. With all that being said, i now run GTAIV with LCPDFR, ELS, SNT, SPOTLIGHT, TOW, Vehicle controll, Traffic control (from here, only traffic mod with taxis fix that has ever worked proplery for me), Braveheart's policing script, v5 graphics tweak, many modded cars, and modded police vehicles. I can play GTAIV with all this and has not crash once.

The lesson I learned was, find out what works with the machine you have, and install the mods one at a time and test them to see if certain ones gives you issues. To many people install all the mods an once and then try to play, only to crash the game and then vent about it. The answers are out there, with some minor research, they can be found. Don't forget, if your having some type of crashing issue, someone else has already probably all ready experienced it and has already done all the hard work to resolve it.

LCPDFR is one of the closest mods of experienceing the role of a police officer out that i have ever come across, add all the other smaller mods that have come out, have put this over the top.

just my 2 cents.

This is why I keep the game as close to original as possible. Simply put, less crashes, less headaches. I only use original cars, lightly modified, and NO ELS but use scripts like the strobe mod that add realism, as well as liveries that do the same.

I've played LCPDFR for 3 straight hours, minor hiccups, but no crashes or restarting on EFLC which tends to have even more issues. Now, I can finally give back to the community with my own works, and advice like you can.

Great write up =)

I too had a similar experience with LCPDFR. I was very excited to have a MOD that Police Simulation based. I was happy with the original cars at first and then wanted cars from my former Department. I found them on another site and then installed them, ELS, radar and a TrafficFlow v5. Trouble started for me as soon as I installed the ELS enabled car, lost textures, crashed often. F10 would not work for calling for Transport etc. It took me a while to figure out that the very awesome looking Police Charger that I downloaded was the cause of my issues. I removed it and found a few non-els cars to install.

Once I installed the non-els cars, I was able to play for hours without any issues. This is a great mod and I am very happy that I found it on YouTube, I have been looking for a sim based Police game for a while (years)

Last night I added -norestrictions and -nomemrestrict to my command line file, and reinstalled ELS with a NYPD police car pack.. It all works perfectly, now. I don't know if those command lines had anything to do with it or not, but it seems like it did. I'm not going to go all out with a total conversion car pack, yet, until I know I got everything tweaked correctly.

BTW, Just so everyone knows, I'm just a regular civilian IRL. I don't have any ties to the police, got a few police friends, but that's about it. I'm just a video game enthusiast who is looking to get some more fun out of my older games.

Last night I added -norestrictions and -nomemrestrict to my command line file, and reinstalled ELS with a NYPD police car pack.. It all works perfectly, now. I don't know if those command lines had anything to do with it or not, but it seems like it did. I'm not going to go all out with a total conversion car pack, yet, until I know I got everything tweaked correctly.

BTW, Just so everyone knows, I'm just a regular civilian IRL. I don't have any ties to the police, got a few police friends, but that's about it. I'm just a video game enthusiast who is looking to get some more fun out of my older games.

As far as I know those two command lines you have put in the file don't work when you are on the latest version of Grand Theft Auto IV. (Version 1.0.7.0)

Also very good write up you did. You put a lot of effort into that post and that's what I like seeing. I'm 100% sure the development team will love to see the feedback put into this post!

Edited August 18, 201213 yr by midnight900

Really? I haven't seen anything about those command lines not working in 1.0.7.0.. They do seem to have done something though, because I reinstalled the Ultimate HD Car Pack again and it's working without a hitch. Can still run LCPDFR without any problems for quite awhile. Long story short, I think I got everything configured the way I want it to be.

Thanks for the feedback on the OP, btw. I thought I lost it once when I accidentally pressed backspace outside the post window, but thanks to this forum's auto save feature, I didn't have to rewrite a single bit of it.