Sam

This is a good article: http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/01/magazine/one-bad-cop.html

Yes, that's exactly what we designed this for. I know that @LMS has been looking into a couple of things related to this (although not ELS). I think it's probably been said a million times before, but the simple answer is no. Sorry - there's various reasons and with a bit of searching you can find them!

Psssst.. Don't tell anyone, but I think we fixed that. Don't tell anyone though!

But... they're our friends :(

I imagine that'd be fine, although it'd probably be best to wait until 0.4 is a little more set in stone and we've talked about some of the other key features - especially our character system and some of the major changes to AI. There's also a couple of things on that list (adding police stations for example), which might not be so relevant anymore.

Right, but EUP isn't strictly required for anything in 0.4 - it's more of an optional thing (although one that we'd highly recommend). In it's default state, LSPDFR 0.4 will support the default LSPD uniforms for the multiplayer characters. Of course, normal peds are still supported too, and EUP only makes sense if you want to use the multiplayer characters for other agencies than just the LSPD. Having said that, we'll probably release 0.4 with an optional pre-built configuration pack which works with EUP "out of the box", so you won't have to spend time adding all of the outfits into our system. We take great care to make sure that LSPDFR performs nicely, and our own @LMS is quite the master at getting under the hood and profiling all of that stuff. If you can add cars and peds to your game already without any issues, then you shouldn't have any problems with using those added assets in 0.4. When we get around to dealing with the API, it's definitely something that we can do. Regardless, anyone is always free to reach out to us before then, though. There's nothing stopping you, or any other developers from getting involved in the conversation about 0.4, just like loads of people have been doing in these topics.

Yes, and we've already been reaching out to various developers regarding LSPDFR 0.4, primarily focused around EUP and RDE at the moment, as these mods tie in very nicely with a lot of our new systems. Regarding your other point, it's not a one-way street. It's fantastic that there's many people like yourself who have created some great mods (and indeed we do frequently recognize and promote these mods throughout the community) which do a bunch of cool things, and add features that, for one reason or another, didn't make their way into an LSPDFR release. At the same time, though, I feel like part of the reason this is possible is because of the way in which these same people can thrive during these periods between LSPDFR updates. I don't think it'd be ideal if we were pushing updates and enhancements every three months as then there's just not the same opportunity for people like you to evolve and enhance their own work if you're constantly having to work around aggressive release cycles.

With 0.4, you can add it yourself!

Well, the whole point is you can now add all of these things by yourself. LSPDFR won't come with a Rockford Hills Police Department, it's just an example of what you can do. If you add some Paleto Bay cars and outfits to your game, then you can easily make a Paleto Bay PD with 0.4.

Yes, this is possible in 0.4 - added cars are fully supported. They're managed by LSPDFR, so they will have the ability to arrest - we'll have more to say about police AI sort of stuff soon. This is a good point about setting the response time. It's not something that is currently possible, but we'll definitely look into it. One of the cool things about 0.4 though is that as you call more units, they do arrive from further and further away. This can be quite interesting if you're close to the border with another agency's areas, as eventually the other agency will start to respond too which makes for some nice looking scenes especially in Davis if you have it set up to be patrolled by the sheriffs.

This is the second part of our LSPDFR 0.4 Preview Series. Not caught up yet? Check out the initial announcement here: https://www.lcpdfr.com/forums/topic/81745-lspdfr-04-announcement-first-preview With LSPDFR 0.3, we got the ball rolling with backup customization, letting players configure their own backup units, giving players the ability to have four separate agencies in their game, each able to cover a different part of the map. Now, back then, this was a pretty cool system - car mods weren't even a thing when we released LSPDFR 0.1, and even by 0.3, the modding scene was nowhere near as massive as it is now. Obviously, there's a whole lot more available to players in terms of content now, especially with popular mods like RDE and EUP which add multiple new ped models, vehicle models, and even entire police agencies. As such, we wanted to find a way to bring these in to LSPDFR. So, forget just rolling the ball. With 0.4, we're hoping to hit it clean out of the park... LSPDFR 0.4 gives you the ability to add your own custom law enforcement agencies, each with their own officers, outfits, inventories, vehicles, police stations and patrol areas. Custom Agencies One of the coolest new capabilities in 0.4 is our new approach to dealing with the various police agencies in the game. LSPDFR has always had a collection of pre-defined agencies, and you've been able to choose from them while going on-duty and you've seen them respond as backup units, but you've never really been able to properly configure them to your liking. Perhaps you've always wanted to set up Rockford Hills as an independent city with its own department, or maybe you've longed for the full, authentic Southern Californian experience of having way, way more cops than you could ever know what to do with? LSPDFR 0.4 now gives you complete control over every agency in the game that we've already added (so the defaults that you're familiar with since 0.1, like the LSPD), but it also lets you define entirely new ones too. The possibilities of this system are extensive: you can even have multiple agencies assigned to share one jurisdiction, and there's no pre-set limits for how many different agencies you can add. Patrol Areas Of course, what good are a bunch of custom agencies if you don't actually see them? 0.4 also expands on our existing backup customization capabilities, now letting you define your own patrol areas. With this system, you can assign any number of agencies to a particular zone in the game (like Strawberry or Del Perro), and you can combine these areas together into wider groups which can be used in-place of individual zones, making things much easier to manage. Likewise, in LSPDFR 0.3, it was called Backup Customization for a reason - the only time you'd really see any of your customizations was when calling for backup. Again, this has been revamped in 0.4, and similarly, we're calling them Patrol Areas for good reason too. You'll now see your agencies actually patrolling in their designated areas. Kiss goodbye to pesky data file edits - LSPDFR 0.4 actually puts cops on the beat. And not just any cops... your cops! Police Stations In light of the way in which we approach police agencies and backup areas, we've also taken the time to rework the various police stations in LSPDFR. Now, in 0.4, each police station is also configurable, and in similar fashion to Agencies and Patrol Areas, this system is also fully expandable, meaning you can define your own police stations too. Aside from the various options like choosing where vehicles will spawn, you can also choose which agency each station belongs to and LSPDFR will configure things accordingly so that you'll actually see vehicles and officers belonging to the specific agency situated around it. This system is pretty powerful in its own right as well, to the extent that even if you defined a police station at a random office building, you'd still see parked cars outside belonging to the agency. Plus, there's also extensive customization options for this too, meaning that you could choose a very specific vehicle model (like a special car with a recruitment livery) to be visible outside a specific police station, without it ever being used as part of the core backup system (i.e. you wouldn't have recruitment vehicles arriving at shots fired). The Davis Sheriff's Station, all grown up... It looks a lot better now with the right people outside! Outfits & Inventories For the first time, 0.4 also introduces full support for multiplayer freemode characters (like those that you'll be familiar with from EUP), meaning that not only can you now play as a custom character in LSPDFR (through our new Character systems, which we'll talk about later), but you can also make it so that all the cops around don't look like clones anymore too! If you add freemode characters to your Agency definitions, LSPDFR will automatically handle all of the nuances that they typically bring, generating everything from unique faces to head overlays and props. And, to top things off - we've included a comprehensive system for managing outfits for multiplayer characters, meaning that LSPDFR 0.4 is fully compatible with EUP, both for player characters and non-player characters. With this, adding all of your favorite custom outfits is a breeze and there's also support for templating - meaning that you can define one complete outfit as a template, which can then be used as a base for other similar outfits - like having the same uniform with both short sleeves and long sleeves. It doesn't stop there, either, because we've also included support for each Agency (and for each different type of officer within that agency) to have their own Inventories too - this handles everything relating to weapons, including attachments, and also supports the MK 2 weapons added in recent GTA Online updates, like pistols with hollow-point ammunition. Putting it all together We've really gone the extra mile in making sure that all of these systems join together, forming what we think is one amazingly powerful platform which will give everyone the freedom to play LSPDFR exactly as they like, with as much or as little additional content as they desire. To give just one example, there's been a lot of thought into the structure behind this, and we've devised a system similar to that of the 'mods' folder in OpenIV, meaning that in most cases all of your customizations will be seamlessly merged together, eliminating the burden that comes with maintaining huge XML files that contain everything and drastically simplifying the process of installing customizations made by others. There's a lot of great mods out there already like Custom Backup by @PNWParksFan, Emergency Uniforms Pack by @Alex_Ashfold, and Realism Dispatch Enhanced by @dilapidated that have done a fantastic job in demonstrating the potential that GTA V has for adding new content and giving players much greater control of their games, and we're really excited to be taking things to a whole new level in 0.4. Finally, I'd like to say a special thanks to @SuperStumpje from the RDE team for his efforts behind the scenes in helping to refine many of the features shown above. We hope that you're all as excited about LSPDFR 0.4 as we are, and we're looking forward to sharing more about 0.4 soon! Customizations to LSPDFR are still made using simple XML files, and can also be split-up and neatly arranged on a per-agency basis. No smart captions here - we just thought this looked cool ;] Note that many of the pictures shown in this post contain a number of vehicle and character modifications (mainly EUP), simply to demonstrate their compatibility with 0.4.

As I said before we are looking forward to sharing more about 0.4 really soon. It's a little bit hard at the moment as I'm in Canada just now, but rest assured that there's more on the way.

It's sure nice to see all the excitement for 0.4. To everyone that's posted their thanks here, let me send my thanks right back to you. We are looking forward to sharing more shortly.

EUP is a fantastic mod, but it's not ideal when you need to use it or Skin Control or something like that to play as a custom character in LSPDFR. We're bringing this all under one roof with LSPDFR - letting people play the mod with our new Character features. And no, the only place you've had a character editor like ours "for years" is GTA Online. This first preview is exactly that, a first preview. You could go look back at the one we did for LSPDFR 0.3 with two screenshots: https://www.lcpdfr.com/forums/topic/55130-lspdfr-03-announcement-first-preview/ "All they did was add a new police car LOL"

It's actually one of my favourite bit about LSPDFR - you have all these talented people out there that share their work for everyone to enjoy. I think it's nice that people can get to pick and choose other plugins that they like. There's no point in us developing some hyper realistic police ranks system for example, as most people probably wouldn't want to play with those kind of constraints. Well, by default we only use things that are already in the game, so that's the LSPD. If you wanted to add British mods, you'd still be able to.

Been a while, huh? You know, when we first started making LSPDFR, the whole process was pretty much one big roller-coaster that didn't have any brakes: there were the obvious highs when we'd finally add in something cool, but the low points were pretty hard as well - the amount of work that went into simply researching how things worked really took its toll as well. And, of course, while this was all going on there just simply wasn't any stopping, we were a couple of (somewhat) real people who essentially lived in Los Santos for just about all of 2015, spending month after month pushing forward and trying to come up with things that everyone here would like to see. So, of course, the grind and the pace of everything simply just wasn't sustainable and after 0.3, it's no secret that while the numbers and everything for our site are still on the up, month after month, things did slow down quite substantially for the actual mod itself. But, we can tell you, this wasn't all bad news - it's afforded us the opportunity to take a step back and really look at the mod and figure out where we want to go next with it. While our approach before was all about cramming as much new stuff as we could into a couple of months of development, we've now been able to look back at many of the original ideas and concepts that we had for LSPDFR and build on them. Of course, with that being said, there's still a lot of new stuff crammed into 0.4! With 0.4, we've taken the time to fix a couple of those "how the hell didn't they add this yet" moments :) Aside from the cool little additions like this, though, the major theme of 0.4 is Character. Ever since seeing the character system for GTA Online, it was always our goal to implement something similar in LSPDFR. There's just something that much more personal and immersive about playing a game with your own character, and the possibilities that it offers are staggering too. And yes, while mods like EUP are fantastic (and awesomely compatible with 0.4!), they still feel somewhat separate or distant. With 0.4, this separation is gone. No, these shots aren't taken from GTA Online. This is our own, fully-featured, LSPDFR Character Creator. Of course, we'll talk more about the new Character features in LSPDFR 0.4 later. The Character Creator menu shown above is obviously only one part of what's new in this regard, although hopefully it emphasizes the effort that we've gone to. Thanks to some of the new additions like this, much of 0.4 actually looks and feels like an entirely new mod altogether. Officer Ronson and his clones obviously couldn't make it to the flashlight party. Stay tuned! We'll be sharing more about 0.4 soon.

And, hey, if you want to go there, let's take a moment to thank our very own @LMS and @MulleDK19 for their efforts in updating RAGE Plugin Hook so quickly. Cancelled doctors appointments, hours-on-end of work, and testing across multiple game versions. An update merely a day after the biggest ever DLC for GTA V - speaks volumes!

Yep, obviously not an ideal situation due to some absences within Content, but be sure to look out for @Fiskey111's latest contribution which will be dropping soon. As for LSPDFR itself, as I said, there's still a lot of stuff and as soon as we feel we're ready to share more about this, you can bet that we will.

No way! Lots more still to come.

Had another couple of posts about the great gun debate in here (which have since been removed) - just wanted to quickly clarify that we realized that the debate was taking away from the topic at hand and everyone involved was getting somewhat distracted/carried away by it so we decided that it'd be better to get back on the actual topic itself. It's no secret that most of our team hold relatively liberal views as far as politics is concerned, but please don't be under the assumption that those views have anything to do with that (and indeed one of the very key elements of liberalism, at least in classical form, is the preservation of liberty and henceforth the ability to debate and be welcoming of other points of view). As such, if you want to make a separate topic about the gun debate then by all means feel free to do so, although it'd be good if posts here could be about the shooting itself and perhaps anything more specifically of interest to this community like developments in the investigation (e.g. I know just now that the FBI is being accused of blundering something to do with unlocking a phone of interest)

Thanks, all is okay - I can certainly understand your confusion. Do you have the link for that video?