custom cars General Note on Custom Cars

[Spartan]

This is primarily for anyone that is looking at suggesting any particular custom cars. Custom cars can be super easy to implement or tougher than US civil war beef jerky rations so to make things a bit easier for which ever poor soul has to deal with them please take a read

When it comes to custom cars, the main thing you want to look for when it comes to implementation is LODs (Levels of Detail). Each file has a .rpf file which contains a collection of textures, frames and .meta files; FiveM for some reason unknown to me, or the universe, cant seem to handle any custom vehicles with a .ytd file (the vehicle textures) greater than 16mb(give or take a mb), they get very weird. There are fixes to this but on a larger scale can take a long time and may not end up being worth the time.  

Sometimes if youre lucky, the .ytd will have a texture file that is just black, but it may be some stupid size like 1024x1024 and you can just extract it, resize and place it back in at a smaller size. This may however reduce quality but I would say its not noticable. Another issue I have seen is that when the vehicles get dirty, the dirt is not to scale with the car, so going through a small dirt patch will plaster your car with a MASSIVE splash of mud.

They should also have a part in the Vehicles.meta saying something like 

 LODDISTANCES CONTENT="FLOAT_ARRAY"
Distances LOD models.
Default parameters:

15.000000
30.000000
70.000000
140.000000
500.000000
500.000000

Thats the LOD from different distances, not all will have this in built and may just stay fully loaded at max detail from any distance which will be tough for the server to when you have 64 people.

Just keep this in mind before posting a long list of HIGH DETAIL car mods.

(A lot of really nice looking cars on GTA5-mods.com are designed for single player and dont worry about optimisation. Some of the nicer ones are made by some guys with a [YCA] tag, having tried to port them over myself, I can say they are beautiful but not worth the time and/or effort, that is my opinion though)

Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk