kyle1975

I have had a problem with GTAV crashing since the update last week. After many many hours of messing with the game I found the issue is in my mod file specifically the update file in the mod file. Has anyone had this issue and has anyone know a way of fixing it? The lesson I have learned so far is backup, backup, backup, your files when things are working good.
Thanks
Kyle  
   

So, I was thinking that after a day of April fools jokes and such that perhaps a few people would appreciate some real news regarding our community, LCPDFR and our plans for the future.  I used to do something like this at the beginning of the year however we were a little sidetracked and honestly didn't have much news that we were ready to share - something which has changed considerably.
 
The first thing that I want to say is that right now, as I speak, we're actually in the middle of a huge surge in popularity, traffic and activity and although the numbers are still a little rough, I can quite confidently say that the past few days have been our most active ever.  Yesterday alone we saw over 400 registrations - a phenomenal number for one day.  Today, we've had 414 so far.  Put simply, we're doing our biggest numbers ever and as the guy that sat for years and watched this project grow slowly, the past few days have been really exciting for me.
 
We have now surpassed GPM in total member count, which I'm pretty sure was the only thing that was left to surpass them on.  Indeed, just a year ago when we really started to expand and grow I don't really think anyone expected that we'd do so well in the long term.  Back at the time, we understood the surge of traffic, all the new content and our sudden boost in popularity, but we didn't really think that it would continue that way - we thought of it as something that would come and stay, or even go, but certainly not come and then keep coming and coming (don't read that the wrong way please!).  Back in late summer 2011, all I could hope for was that we could be a viable and progressive alternative, and now I feel pretty silly for setting my expectations so low.
 
On the subject of all this development and activity, 2013 is shaping up to be quite a big year for us.  Aside from the blockbuster release of GTA V later on in September, there's a lot more going on closer to home with the recently announced ELS v7 coming out, for the first time ever on LCPDFR.com, in a little bit and also with LCPDFR and another project I've been working on for the past couple of months in close collaboration with Lt.Caine and LMS.  Basically, as a lot of you will know, I've always wanted to make a lighting system that's a decent alternative to ELS.  Years ago I put out a small and unfinished script called Illumination which used GTA IV's native method to draw light coronas in the game world, making a decent LED lightbar and an absolutely horrible traffic advisor.  This didn't really go anywhere because of how bad it was, the complications of the whole thing and the popularity of ELS at the time.  A while back I decided to revisit it, and didn't really get much closer although I did come up with some ways of making things look a whole lot better but nonetheless it was scrapped and forgotten about.  The real breakthrough came early this year, however, when Lt.Caine sent me a message after something like 2 years of being away.  After a few days, we had a basic plan put together, which brings me to the first announcement I have for everyone:
 
Emergency Lighting System (ELS) Dot Net
 

 
ELS Dot Net is a special version of ELS, running on the .Net Framework and being developed primarily by myself.  It is a corona based system, like a few of the ones that have been shown of recently, although it has several key differences:
Fully customisable and distributable patterns and vehicle configurations The ELS interface everybody knows and loves Several different light types, such as LEDs and halogen bulbs Realistic rotator lightbar emulation (with rotating beacons and environmental lighting) Built-in visibility checks for coronas shining through solid objects and such AdvancedHook integration for flashing headlights and taillights (agan, these are customisable) I hope to get some video of some of the cool features of ELS.Net released in the next week.
 
 
The next thing I want to address is LCPDFR, and where we're headed with it.  For the past few months, LMS has been really hard at work with the mod, doing his best to write a whole host of new systems for it which I'll talk about a little later on this year - most likely in a couple of months.  All of our development energy and focus as far as LCPDFR is concerned has, however, been directed towards these improvements which I suppose you could describe better as a complete rewrite, because that, to be quite frank, is what they are.  We wanted to go further with the mod in the sense that instead of adding new callouts or pursuit features, we wanted to make the very core of it much more powerful and easy to build on.  After many months, we're finally almost there with almost all of the features of the ever elusive 0.95 RC3 ported over and re-worked for the new engine.  I thought that instead of waffling about the things LMS has been doing, it would be better to briefly list some examples of the new functionality present:
PedIntelligence class - it handles AI for peds, meaning that now instead of people not giving a damn that you're pursuing a highly armed suspect right in front of them, they'll actually notice and care about it! Pursuits - We have some really powerful stuff for all sorts of chases, both in cars and on foot.  Instead of using ranges and distance checks, officers can now lose sight of the suspects, and if they do, will spread out and search a perimeter like in real life (helicopters are really useful now). Drastically improved Police AI - Suspect with a gun?  Cops will start shouting at him to drop it. Misc. Improvements - New tasks for things like pulling over (they do it a lot better now), ability to get the side of the street that a vehicle is on (useful for traffic stops) and full support for controllers. All in all, we're trying our best to make the next version of LCPDFR (which is most likely going to be 1.0) as powerful as we can given our limited resources not to mention all of our other commitments.  I'm sorry that it has taken this long for us to provide some concrete information about the state of the project - we've just been incredibly busy with all sorts of other things and only a few weeks ago were we anywhere near certain of what direction we were headed in with it.  That being said, the one thing I can say with confidence is that you will see a release of LCPDFR this year, unless of course LMS gest run over by a bus or something and my screen spontaneously combusts sending highly charged lethal glass shards through my body, but that won't happen hopefully!
 
To conclude, I'm feeling really optimistic about the next 8 months.  I think we've got a lot of exciting things on the way and from what we can tell, we're obviously doing something right on the community side of things given our recent statistics.  I think we've all proven that LCPDFR, both the mod and this awesome website, has been nothing short of a total game-changer.
 
On behalf of the entire team here, I'd like to thank everyone for their continued support, even after 3 and a half long years.  We've really made something special here, and it's not going to stop anytime soon.
 
Sam.

This is a quick and hopefully helpful tutorial that will help new people know how to add custom cars to their game focusing mainly on the Police cars, but it's the same steps for other cars. I won't be adding links for the obvious reason that I don't want to push any copyright infringement linking where I should not.

When you download a pack, it will be as a compressed archive .zip .rar .7z whatever, you will need a program to open these files. Windows Explorer on Windows 7 computers will open most .zip files, but for .rar or .7z you will need better programs. I recommend WinRAR which you can google to find, and install.

Next open up the folder and extract it. I recommend putting it in a folder you will easily be able to find, and I also recommend putting each different car in to a different folder as some will have the same .wft .wtd file names causing overwrites.

Next you will need to get OpenIV or SparkIV, again google is our dear and glorious leader for this. for the rest of the tutorial I will assume that you have SparkIV.

!!!IMPORTANT!!!!
Don't skip this step. Manually browse to your GTAIV folder and select the cdimages folder copy and paste it in to a separate folder for backup purposes!!! If you fail to comply with this step then if you wish to revert back to the original cars you will have to remove the game completely and start again!!

Open up SparkIV and then click Browse, give this some time as it attempts to find your GTA IV folder. When it refresh's go through the tree to GTAIV -> pc -> models -> cdimages then on the right side of the window double click vehicles.img to open it.

police.wft + police.wtd is your first police car in selection
police2.wft + police2.wtd is a second car.
polpatriot.wft + polpatriot.wtf is a paddy wagon.
pstockade.wft + pstockade.wtd is a paddy wagon.
noose.wft + noose.wtd is a car.
nstockade.wft + nstockade.wtd is a tactical unit truck.
fbi.wft + fbi.wtd is another car.

It is important to assign a car to a car, and a truck to a truck. Most mods will tell you what they are designed for.

Now what you have to do is go to the downloaded cars that you have and change the .wft and .wtd to one of the ones above to be recognized by LCPDFR. You can only have one car under each name, so don't have two of police and one police2. (honnestly I have not tryed adding cars under different names, but from my limited knowledge if they do show up in game, and are spawnable, I don't believe that LCPDFR will let you choose one when you come on duty....feel free to experement and play at your own expense, just hope you have a backup, also I am not sure if you can modify it so that LCPDFR can pick it up, again I am not wanting to mess with my system.)

Then click import and import both the .wft and .wtd files for each car you have and then click save.

Now you have added the cars in to the game. Enjoy them.

Sorry that this tutorial is not complete with screen shots, I do plan on including them later, but it's late, and I need to nap before work tonight. I hope this helps many people, and if there are things that I have missed please let me know and I will fix it.

EDIT: 06/03/2012: Added the other cars, and their descriptions.