Villematic

--- I had posted this a few months ago, and it was pinned, but a server failure apparently removed my post. I had no backup copy of my old post, so I had to make this one from scratch. If I forget something that was in the old post, please leave a comment! I will be updating as I remember things. ---
--- Thanks Jay for merging this! ---

Many people find themselves stuck wondering why their game crashes with an SMPA60 error. This post will attempt to clarify any questions involving the error, and explain what causes it and how it works.

First off, the SMPA60 error is caused by modded vehicles. That's it.

Single player:
Whenever the game creates a savegame file it does more than just save the name of the car that is at a safe house. It seems to also record the vehicle positioning, car components, et cetera. Normally, this works just fine. The problem arises when you replace the car's data files with that of another car. When you do that, the game loads the information in the savegame file, including all the information about the car that was saved there. When you replace the data files, the game tries to apply or compare those loaded files to the files that are in the vehicle.img file. This does not work. The game is attempting to apply outdated, invalid data to data which you imported. This causes the game to "fault," which is also why the SMPA60 error is called an "Unrecoverable Fault" error. The game has no way of recovering the old car data you replaced. The only solution is to take the car you had before, place it back in the vehicles.img file, load the game, remove the car from the safe house, and then save the game.

YOU CAN ONLY MOD A CAR WHEN IT IS NOT SAVED AT A SAFE HOUSE!

Multiplayer:
Multiplayer is a little more complex. Safe houses do not tie in with multiplayer. Instead, the problem arises when people playing a game do not have the same cars. The game becomes scrambled trying to figure out what car models and textures to load, because there are two (or more) sets of data for one car. There is no way this will work if the game tries to load a car. It has too much (different) data to work with, and errors out. THe fix here is to (preferably) use all stock vehicles, or make sure that everyone has the same cars.

As a side note, editing the values in data files, such as carcols.dat, does not seem to produce errors.