Sam

Perhaps, yes, but that comes at a price. Policing here is far too bureaucratic. As far as I'm aware there's forms or paperwork that have to be filled in for just about everything and it creates a huge workload on the officers. There's certainly no organisation up here when it comes to equipment, uniform or vehicles though. I saw one of their new Volvo traffic cars through in Stirling today and it had the ugly Police Scotland on the front of it and then the rest was just full battenburg with only the Police Scotland twitter logo on the side. If you were a tourist or something and you only saw the side of it, you wouldn't have a clue what it was.

Oh, absolutely. I love how they couldn't even get a logo ready in time for the changeover and how they don't even have standard badges or cars - it's a mess.

Very rare indeed to get a ridealong in the UK. Up here they said that for data protection and safety concerns they don't do them.

Look, here's the thing. I don't think there's any reasonable denying that 9/11 was a tragic event. Is it fine for people to remember it and those affected by it? Absolutely. Is it wrong for someone to make a suggestion that people should focus less on remembrance and instead try to move on and look forward? Absolutely not. Don't turn this into a heated debate, don't get carried away with opposing opinions. Keep it civilised or we will start handing out warnings and suspensions.

Community Team & Staffing Update (August 27th, 2013) As many of you probably will have noticed, we've been expanding the size of our Community Team even more to better cater for the ever growing community and to help us be even more efficient and effective in our community moderation. Iconography, and Yard1 have now joined the Community Team as junior moderators as well as Sgt. Jackson who was formerly the French Forum Moderator. As was the case last time, our new staff will be working initially under the guidance and supervision of myself and Nicolai, the Community Team supervisor, as well as the existing staff team. I'm hopeful that with these additions, we'll be in a better place to address some of the concerns which have been raised recently regarding the conduct of members in the community. As always, I also hope that everybody will join with us in welcoming our new staff members to the team, Sam.

Yeah, that's a great point about the downloads ratings. I think we'll have a new system for that shortly, probably something where you can only give positive votes, like the forum rep. Regarding moderation, with our extra staff we'll be able to cover a lot more ground and I'm hopeful that because of this, more will be done to combat trolls and abusive members who have no place here.

I've not insulted you, I've not called you out. A posted a link to a thread where you were one of many participants. As far as I can remember you've not actually given an answer yet as to why your opinion differs regarding that as well. If you actually have a plausible reason for why the low quality texture in the example I made up shouldn't be allowed, then I'd like to hear it. I agree fully with not allowing content with incomplete credits, with inadequate descriptions and with poor screenshots, etc. I don't really think there's any place in the downloads section for people that can't be bothered to fill in the information and make the file look somewhat presentable, but I don't think it is our place to pick and choose what's of sufficient quality when it comes to the actual mod itself. If someone takes an unlocked car into a modelling program and sticks one of the lightbars from the development resources section onto it and then deletes all the ELS parts and adds the siren dummies onto it, effectively making it a non-ELS lightbar - is this enough to let them submit it to the downloads section? If someone just sticks the lightbar on it but makes a bunch of snazzy pictures and graphics to go along with it and releases it in a very presentable format, is this enough to let them submit it to the downloads section? I just think it's far too subjective. The only time I can think of that something shouldn't be allowed to be submitted is if is really badly broken, for example a model that someone's managed to screw up so bad that it crashes your game as soon as it spawns. Is it wrong to have lots of variations of the same thing? I don't see why it is, surely the more choice that our members have, the better. Would you complain if a shop had 20 varieties of chilled drinks? What about if it only had 3?

See the problem is that you say "people are looking for quality, not poorly made modifications". That is definitely true for me, it'll be true for you and it'll be true for many others as well. The thing is, though, there are actually people who don't mind so much about the quality of the modifications. I'm not sure if you were around back when LCPDFR was started, but the first release of LCPDFR was anything but a quality modification. Still, it was accepted on GTAForums and it was accepted on GTAGarage despite the fact that it crashed frequently and lacked polish and everything else. Still, despite all of this, it was hugely popular. Now, the impression that I get from your opinion is basically that you don't think that low quality mods should be allowed in the downloads section. I would argue if that was the case back at GTAF though, LCPDFR would never have been allowed. I guess the simplest way to put it is like this. If there's a mod of fairly low quality, say for example a really bad texture job of a police car from Edinburgh, if there's even just 20 people that download it and really enjoy it despite this, isn't it worth having in the downloads section? --- As far as the opinions on stuff and comments getting removed goes, could you give me a link to the file in question? Everyone is allowed to give their opinion, we just expect that criticism should be made in a constructive manner.

That's what people compare us, as staff members, to when we step in and stop it.

Well if you look at the issue being discussed here - people are tired with the drama. I mean that's clearly obvious from the first post and the posts after. Now, if the drama is a problem, then surely people would think that it is something that we, as the Community Team, should do something about. The problem with that though is that when we do step in and try to cut down on the drama, stuff like that incident with you happens. I think that being a good example, it is only fitting that it is used to demonstrate my point. No dust is being kicked up - I'm simply making it clear why it is a tough situation for us as well.

As you might have noticed, we're beefing up our moderation staff and by the end of next week, we'll have four more moderators on hand to deal with this stuff. Of course, we'll have more to say about this when the time comes. I'm hoping also that with some of the things which are coming up in the next couple of months (GTA V and something else which we won't name because, well, that would be telling), there will hopefully be a better atmosphere. Unfortunately every time that we crack down on this sort of thing, someone posts a topic complaining about how we've turned into Nazi Germany and how we're worse than North Korea, etc. etc. It would be really helpful for us if people could report things like this and then when we start taking action about it, it would be even more helpful if everyone could refrain from jumping on the Nazi/SS/North Korea/China/Communist (lol)/Whatever else bandwagon. The sad fact is that this place revolves around a large modding community, and when you have people with egos the size of Jupiter, people who just aren't old enough and mature enough to handle themselves properly and people that have it stuck in their thick skull that they are the best in the world at everything, all you need is for all of these to combine along with the new modders and the majority of the community who enjoy the content on offer, it is a very combustible element to say the least. Indeed, if you want an example of what happens when all of that combines, look no further than this: '?do=embed' frameborder='0' data-embedContent>>

Usually on videos of this sort of thing you can at least see some sort of reason, however wrong it may be, as to why the cops started shooting. Here though, its practically just the same the entire video, you can barely even see the guy inside. All I noticed was some sort of "take one step closer and i'll kill you" and then a pause and then shots starting.

Hope I'm not the only one that thinks that that car looks disgusting.

Any script that doesn't use methods like Traffic Flow or Traffic Load, etc., isn't worth using. Things like Traffic Control System delete and spawn new cars - you do not under any circumstances want to use a script like this as it can cause a whole host of issues - imagine that a script (like LCPDFR) is using a car and then one of these scripts just deletes it. Crash. The issue with the taxi bug is quite simple really. The taxi is the most common car in GTA IV. When you install car mods you mess up the memory of the game - it simply isn't built with car mods in mind. GTA IV is meant to be run as it is supplied in its original format and since there is no modding support whatsoever, things can really go very wrong when you change this.

There's a mod called Player Selector that lets you do this, its on GTAForums somewhere.

You'll just have to play around and see what works best.

It will run the game, but only on low settings. The processor speed of 2.3 GHz is going to really hold you back given how much GTA IV depends on the CPU. Additionally, the mobile versions of CPUs and GPUs are not the same as desktop versions, they are generally smaller and less powerful. If you want to run GTA IV on high settings and at a good framerate on a laptop, you'll need something much more powerful than that. For an idea of what GTA IV on a laptop is like, I have it on my MacBook Pro which has an Intel Core i7-3635QM CPU @ 3.40GHz and a NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M - both of which are stronger than the stuff in the laptop you're looking at (I think). I get a stable 30 FPS on this running at medium/high settings.

You got played.

They just get lonely and need a buddy to tag along with, be nice to them!

4S - I like it very much.

I made it last week, had good fun drawing the party hat out - it was nice to make something to celebrate our birthday. The most important thing about LCPDFR now is indeed the way it has grown and grown. I'm not sure if there are even many people here today who were around back in the early days four years ago when it was just me, a video and a GTAForums topic. I suppose that demonstrates just how much things have changed, we're now an astonishingly big website that has some impressive traffic rankings such as being in the top 80,000 and 25,000 sites in the world and in the US respectively. Something like LCPDFR was always what I wanted when I played all the previous GTA games and each time it was looking more promising and likely until IV when my much loved cop outfit was nowhere to be found. I remember playing San Andreas back when it came out on PS2 and doing my best to meet Barbara's demands of going to a nightclub despite her living in the middle of nowhere. Many planes and helicopters and bikes were sacrificed for this outrageous request and it was actually one of the hardest parts of the game to get her to the nightclub in SF before she got bored and you failed the mission. Of course, all of this just to unlock the cop uniform which didn't even look like the real deal. That really is where LCPDFR originates, just my simple wish to play as a cop in a GTA game. It just so happened that I had started learning programming and that the great folks over at GTAForums had started putting together tools for modding the game, like Aru and HazardX with their scripthooks, which without, LCPDFR would never exist. I simply gave it a try and here we are, 4 years later. Back to the point at hand though, LCPDFR today isn't really about me or the people who've come onboard over the years like Jay, LMS and Lil-rich. LCPDFR is now centred around the community that has grown out of it in a very natural way which is due in large part to the mod itself and to people like Jay who have been instrumental in the creation of the website (he was the one that got the domain and got us set up with Drupal and then IPB as a replacement for the old HTML site), but also on an equally important note to the people who come here every day to participate in this community. Of course, let's not forget the hard work of the people that make this possible as well, the guys in the Community Team who for the past 3 years have dealt with just about everything you can imagine.

Thanks for the kind words everyone. We've got some real treats coming your way this month.

Happy birthday!