SuperPyroManiac

Id argue the XML con for DLS is less true since you can combine multiple vehicles into a single xml if they use the same patterns or default to carcols. Overall love the post though.

Quick summary of my take on the 3 lighting systems for GTA V. (ELS, ELS Hybrid, DLS). I posted this on my Discord a few months ago and people seem to understand the difference between the 3 lighting systems used for LSPDFR (I do not play FiveM so I have no knowledge with those) so they have a better understanding on how and what the different types of lighting are used for gaming. From the San Andreas days of Emergency Lighting Mod (ELM) to IV with ELS to V with ELS, to ELS Hybrid to DLS, I have seen and used it all. Recently, I have done a convert of my game and development work to DLS from ELS. I enjoy ELS, but I enjoy DLS more as I can be more creative with patterns and lighting. So let's break down and give a short, sweet, simple run down of what you see people creating now. Lastly, don't try and take credit for this list, it's sad I have to say that but please credit where it's due if you were to use this list.


Emergency Lighting System (ELS)
Pros
Simplicity (Very new user friendly)
Config lighting stages easily / change patterns
Largest vehicle pool due to age
Cons
Limited on lighting
"Floaters" if want to use lights on moving vehicle parts (Doors, Trunk, Compartment Doors)
Limited pattern creations
No further development
12 Extras only. (Realistically, 10 is what most devs use)

Emergency Lighting System Hybrid (ELS + Non ELS)
Pros
Custom lighting config / patterns
Large variety of extras can be used (TA, Flood, Cruise)
Easily adaptable to ELS controls
32 sirens + 12 extras can be used to create
Cons
Stage 3 lighting only
Cannot change lighting patterns
Limited lighting controls
No further development (Due to it being ELS controlled)

Dynamic Lighting System (DLS)
Pros
ELS on crack.
Large variety of what lights can do (Stages, TA, Alley, Cruise, Brake Override, Patterns, Sync System, etc)
Vehicles become advanced with lighting controls (Multiple vehicles can run off 1 XML)
Cons
Lengthy XML creation / edits (Not new user friendly unlike ELS)
Compatible with ELS but must disable extra patch in the dls.ini to work
Potential crashing issues when using both ELS and DLS
Majority of LSPDFR users use ELS
Restricted to 32 sirens only
AI vehicles can ONLY use police audio hash to enable sirens.
Very slow development / updates

I know I have missed stuff or maybe a few things were updated since I created this back in April 2026 but still holds general true and ideal for people to understand. Please feel free to post any questions / comments / concerns as I am willing to be assist the best I can with this topic.

If this is in the wrong section, apologizes!

Happy modding folks!

I'd love to see in the next RPH patch if you could add logging for RPH plugin versions. (Plugins loaded by RPH) LSPDFR plugins are logged in detail but RPH plugins do not get the same treatment.

Seems like a 1 liner request, but would greatly improve support for RPH specific plugins.

Depends on your use case, this event returns all of the "plugins" (assemblies) lspdfr loads. This specific method just returns your own assembly from that list. In most cases you do not need this. Even in my plugins I get by just using Functions.GetAllUserPlugins()

I'd love to see in the next RPH patch if you could add logging for RPH plugin versions. (Plugins loaded by RPH) LSPDFR plugins are logged in detail but RPH plugins do not get the same treatment.

Seems like a 1 liner request, but would greatly improve support for RPH specific plugins.

This is a good idea tbh. I try to remove them when I see them, but for auto approved files they slip past.

I strongly suggest that at least the posting of .exe and .zip files be disabled in mod file descriptions, as I'm pretty sure virus checks aren't done on them, and from what I see, it's most often the author uploading mod files that way for whatever reason.

It's not just GTA either, it started with unfinished texture packs for minecraft, and clothing addons for the sims. Now its every game seems to go crazy with this paid model. I mean the fact cars for LSPDFR will cost as much if not more than GTA itself, for high poly optimized vehicles with hardly realistic meta files is insane.

Only way to make a change is to not buy them and stick to the thousands of free mods.

It's not just GTA either, it started with unfinished texture packs for minecraft, and clothing addons for the sims. Now its every game seems to go crazy with this paid model. I mean the fact cars for LSPDFR will cost as much if not more than GTA itself, for high poly optimized vehicles with hardly realistic meta files is insane.

Only way to make a change is to not buy them and stick to the thousands of free mods.

Hello everyone,

I just want to say thank you for sticking with us through the biggest site update we’ve ever rolled out. Last year’s launch didn’t go as smoothly as we’d hoped and we know there have been some issues along the way, so we really appreciate your patience and feedback. It’s helped us get to a much stronger place moving forward.
Now that things have stabilised a bit, today we’re launching a bunch of new features and changes that we think you’re going to love.
Discovery: Tag Filters
The whole point of our tag system has always been discovery. You’ve been able to click into tags and explore everything connected to them, but proper filtering on category pages was missing.

That’s now changed.
You can now explore and filter by tags directly on category pages, with the system built to expand much further over time.
To start, we’ve added brand, country, and year filters to vehicle pages, along with a “Made with AI” filter on script pages.

You can now filter by Brand, Country and Year on Vehicle pages.

A small change on the surface, but a big step toward making discovery faster, cleaner, and far more useful across the platform.
Discovery: Site Wide Tag Exclusions
To give you even more control over what you see on LCPDFR.com, we’re introducing account-level, site-wide tag exclusions.
Any files matching the tags you choose to exclude will be hidden across the site — including the downloads portal, download feeds, trending and featured sections, and search results.

The tag filtering controls, now available in Account Settings. In this example, files tagged as outdated are being hidden.


The downloads category page, showing 1 active account tag filter and 34 files hidden as a result of excluding the outdated tag.

Whether you want to hide AI-generated work, certain vehicle types, specific countries, or even particular vehicle years, we hope this system helps you fully customize how you browse content on LCPDFR.com.

Note: We're aware of an issue of going to Account Settings, then navigating to Downloads Filters will not load the tag box correctly and we're working to fix it. Refreshing the page if the tag box doesn't load will workaround this for now.

Site Experience: Thanking Creators
As a thank you to our creators and contributors, we’ll be removing external advertisements for community members who are actively engaging with the community.

The exact criteria may evolve over time, as our community contributes in many different ways. Whether you're helping new members with questions, uploading mods, or simply being an active part of the site, we want to recognize and reward those contributions.

For creators who share their mods with the LCPDFR.com community, ads will be removed once you reach 1,000 verified unique downloads.

For all other members, ads will be removed once you achieve the Sergeant rank (1,000 community points). Our rank system awards points for a variety of community activity, including forum posts, gallery uploads, comments and reviews (+1), giving or receiving reputation (+1), gaining followers (+2), and more.

This change is going live today, though it may take some time after reaching the requirements for the benefit to be applied to your account. Logging in and out if you meet the criteria may help this apply sooner. We also plan to add a way for members to track their progress toward these thresholds in the future.

This is one small way we can give back to the creators and community members who help make the site what it is.

Developer: API
Our old API has started to show its age and wasn’t really built with the growth of the website in mind.

Historically, we’ve had to handle security on LCPDFR.com in some fairly unique ways. While we want to discourage automated traffic, serving an API directly from our main website domain meant we also had to keep certain protections less aggressive than we would’ve liked.

The API has been moved onto its own dedicated infrastructure, allowing us to properly monitor usage, apply separate security procedures, and relax some of the harsher caching behaviour that existed previously.

We’ve also adopted the more standard approach of enforcing API keys across the new API. This allows us to better track usage, apply limits where necessary, and manage access more effectively. API keys are issued in line with our new API Guidelines, which outline acceptable usage and restrictions around commercial use.

There are currently two key types available:
Version Check Keys — designed for embedding into your own plugins, primarily for update and version checking.
Full API Keys — provide broader access to the API, including mass file listings, extended file metadata (such as tags), .NET assembly data, and more.
Full API keys require approval. We may contact you with questions about your intended usage. Both full and limited API keys require an active LCPDFR.com account that has been active for at least one week.

You can request API keys in your Account Settings.

You can see usage limits, documentation and regenerate your key from Account Settings.


With the new downloads listing API, you can list up to 10,000 files at once. Full documentation available in Account Settings with an issued key.

Overall, this new API infrastructure gives us a far more scalable and maintainable foundation moving forward. Separating the API from the main website allows us to improve security, reliability, and performance without impacting the experience of regular community members on LCPDFR.com.

We’ll be deprecating the old API in stages.
Effective today, the old version check API endpoint (checkForUpdates) will no longer be available for newly submitted files. All remaining endpoints, apart from checkForUpdates, will be turned off on 1 June.
We understand that deprecating checkForUpdates may cause issues for some plugins. We plan to phase this out later this year in stages and with planned brownouts and will share more details in the API forum closer to the time.
We’re not stopping there, either.

While these updates are a big step forward for discovery, customization, and the overall site experience, we already know where we want to focus next, on search.

The truth is, we’ve largely outgrown the search system our current software provides. It was never really built for our mod heavy platform with this much content, this many tags, and the kind of discovery features we now want to support properly.

Because of that, search is probably going to involve a lot more custom work from us moving forward. Better relevance, smarter filtering with the new options announced above, and a generally cleaner experience are all things we want to improve over time.

As always, we do appreciate your feedback. We try to guide LCPDFR.com based on what the community wants, alongside the areas where we feel we can improve and do better ourselves.

We’re looking forward to seeing everyone use these new features, and we’re excited to keep improving the platform alongside the community that makes it what it is.

Cyan.

Ah, I will relay this on, but I'll tell them not to rush it this time 🙂

I approved it. Apologize for the delay, work has been pushing 14 hours shifts on me for the holidays.

Never heard of her.

Yeah I can agree here, its useful as a mod but by the time you guys see it, I've already gone over it.
Though the counter argument is c++ mods, they are compiled to binary and it is much harder to go through as it decompiles to assembly which is not fun to try and find sneaky stuff with in which case it might be useful for people to see the virus total results.

Community Featured Picks
Hello all!
Up until now, our "Featured Section" has been curated manually based on trends and quality. I often get DMs asking to feature specific projects, and I want to make that process more transparent and accessible to everyone.

Moving forward, please use this thread to suggest featured files.
I will be actively monitoring this post. If you see a file (or have created one) that you think deserves attention, post it here!

Since October of last year, we’ve been hard at work on a modern, refreshed redesign of LCPDFR.com. Today, we’re excited to finally share it with you.

This new version of the site isn’t just a visual upgrade. Behind the scenes, we’ve rebuilt a lot of the core systems that power LCPDFR.com – from the way pages load, to how content is organised, to the tools we’ll be able to build on top of this platform going into 2026 and beyond. We’ve also migrated our custom downloads system and several other bespoke features onto this new foundation.

This launch marks the ninth design update LCPDFR.com has had, and it’s the biggest change since our last major overhaul in 2015 – almost a decade ago.

A Fresh Look, Built for Today
The new site introduces a clean, modern interface designed to be faster, clearer and more intuitive to navigate.
Light & Dark Mode
The site now supports a fully integrated light and dark mode that follows your operating system’s preference. If you’d rather choose manually, you can toggle between themes using the control at the bottom of the site.
Redesigned Editor
Our content editor has been completely rebuilt. It’s more powerful, more responsive, and much easier to use than the previous version. Whether you’re writing mod descriptions, making posts, or writing private messages, the editing experience should feel significantly smoother.

Mods: Front and Center
Mods are at the heart of LCPDFR.com, so we’ve made sure they’re easier than ever to find and browse.
Mods First in Navigation
You’ll now see the Mods portal prominently placed as the first item in the navigation, reflecting what most visitors come here for.
New Grid-Based Layout
Mods are now presented in an expansive grid view, making it easier to scan through content, compare options at a glance, and discover new creations.

Improved Tag Browsing
Tags now play a much bigger role in helping you discover content. Clicking any tag will take you to a dedicated tag results page, where you can explore all related content in one place.



Smarter Search
Finding exactly what you’re looking for should feel quicker and more flexible.
Quicksearch with Filters
The quicksearch has been upgraded with built-in filters, including the ability to search directly by tags. This makes it easier to narrow down results and jump straight to the content you care about.

A full search overhaul is in progress, and what you see in quicksearch today is just a small preview of what’s coming.


Known Issues
As with any major platform change, there are a few rough edges we’re already aware of:
Some content pages under LSPDFR, LML, and RESOURCES may currently appear broken or incorrectly formatted. We’re actively working on fixing these layouts.
The GTA V Native Database is currently not displaying.
Some profiles are showing an error 500.
There are some issues with LSPDFR Sync, we have paused our Pateron until fully resolved.
A small amount of users may be experiencing issues with notifications.
Multiple issues reported by community members (thank you) in this thread.
Some of these have now been fixed. Please continue to report any issues you see.
Thank you for your patience while we work through these issues. Your feedback here is especially helpful, so if you spot anything else that looks off, please let us know.

What's Next and Fixes
This redesign is just the foundation for what’s coming next. With the new platform in place, we’ll be able to iterate more quickly and deliver new features faster than before. Over the next days and weeks, our main focus will be on tightening up the rough edges from this migration and fixing the issues that you might find.
Here are some of the things at the top of our list:
New API for the Mods Center
We've almost finished work on a new API for our mod center - we just have a few changes to make and we hope to share updates on this in the coming days.
Full Search Overhaul
Beyond the improvements you can already see in quicksearch, we’re planning a complete search upgrade to make finding content more accurate, more powerful, and more pleasant overall.
Visual and UX Polish
You may notice small visual quirks, spacing issues, or inconsistent elements across the site. We’re tracking these and will be rolling out incremental polish updates as we go.

This is a big milestone for LCPDFR.com, and we’re really excited to finally share it with you. Take a look around, try out the new features, and let us know what you think – your feedback will help us shape the next round of improvements.

We also hope to have some LSPDFR Enhanced news to share with you in the coming days.

Cyan.

Community Featured Picks
Hello all!
Up until now, our "Featured Section" has been curated manually based on trends and quality. I often get DMs asking to feature specific projects, and I want to make that process more transparent and accessible to everyone.

Moving forward, please use this thread to suggest featured files.
I will be actively monitoring this post. If you see a file (or have created one) that you think deserves attention, post it here!

Yeah I can agree here, its useful as a mod but by the time you guys see it, I've already gone over it.
Though the counter argument is c++ mods, they are compiled to binary and it is much harder to go through as it decompiles to assembly which is not fun to try and find sneaky stuff with in which case it might be useful for people to see the virus total results.

Glad to help !! SuperCallouts, Yobbin Callouts, MCCallouts & DeryllCallouts are some I use and highly recommend. Just ensure you're checking you have ALL the requirements necessary prior to downloading each callout. If you have any other questions don't hesitate to ask. 
 
 

I feel so dumb. Sorry for wasting time.

Basically, I followed PyroManiac's instructions and opened my OpenIV. Then, I took a second look at my UB config and I saw one PED line chance is set to "UPTOPLAYER". I then fixed it, launched GTA, and it went on smoothly.

Sorry for wasting all of your time, but thank you for reminding me to double check my UB config. Wish you all good luck and keep helping others

Looks like you edited your backup configs, and something is broken in them so the game fails to spawn them. Plugins that spawn backup then crash because it failed.

 
 

Jeremy Dewitte would love this.

That is a fantastic news! Thank you very much for this long awaited progress update, I am (really) looking forward to see what the team has been cooking under the hood!

On a small side note, I am simply amazed to see everyone (the devs and community) so involved in making LSPDFR bigger and greater every day, and I am so happy when I see how far this mod came from... A big thank you to everyone involved reading this, your passion is amazing to see and follow!