Replace any vehicle in GTA 5 | Lvl1 ∙ Part 5 ►Colors & Custom Tuning Archive
Learn how to replace any vehicle in GTA 5 by any mod.
Welcome at the last part of first level of proper vehicle replacing tutorial. Our goal today is to learn something about carvariation file. What is inside, what aspects and what and how it affect in the game. For our new Lambo we don’t need to change this data for proper working as we di choose good replacement, but in some cases not editing these data may cause more problems. So let’s learn how to avoid them.
Explaining carvariations
You know what’s the first to check out. That’s right, this is the beginning of the vehicle’s data:
<Item>
<modelName>Straight to the first line, this is the vehicle model name only.
colors
One of two main sections of data in this file are colors. Here can be up to 25 color variations for each vehicle while each is starting with the <Item> line.
indices
Below this line you may have 4 or 6 lines with some numbers. These number’s are colors IDs which you can browse in this usefull tool. First ID is primary color, second ID is secondary color, third ID is pearlescent color, fourth ID is wheels color and last two are optionable as these values was added in later updates. Fifth ID is used for interiors colors and sixth ID is used for dials colors, available to change in Benny’s motorwork, not in basic tuning shops. In mods, these colors may be used for any other colors depending on authors choice.
liveries
Here you have multiple lines looking the same way as <Item value=”true/false” />. Number of the lines here is many times random or this whole section is missing sometimes when vehicle don’t have any liveries. To make the livery work you have to set this value as true. The position of exact item is number of the texture. In our case first Item is set as true what means our vehicle would use livery named as ‘xxx_sign_1’.
But our Lambo don’t have any liveries so this may be set as false with no changes. When vehicle have more liveries you can set different liveries as default in every color variation but you can have only one line set as true inside one variation. As I mentioned before, every variations start as new Item following with the indices. In one variation you set first livery as true, in different no matter if you use same or different colors ID and you should set second livery as true etc.
If you are using the vehicle with liveries and you change these data here but forgot to add flag_has_livery in vehicles.meta your car could have weird acting flickering paint. The reason is that vehicle has livery in it’s textures file (ytd file) and you tell the game here that it have to use this livery as default. But in the vehicles data you didn’t tell that vehicle should have livery so it act like it don’t have livery and the game is confused if it should or should not have livery.
kits
This next line define what tuning parts is this vehicle using. This have to be the name from carcols data.
windowsWithExposedEdges
There may be wrote name of any window model of exact vehicle, but I never seen this value used so just ignore it and leave it empty.
plateProbabilities
Define what color plate and how often have to be used . There can be more variations and each is as usually starting with the <Item> line.
Name
Define which of 6 license variations use — standard white, white plate 2, blue plate, yellow plate, police guv plate or yankton plate.
Value
Define percentage of using this color license plate. If you set only one variation this have to be 100. Once you use more variations the total sum of all percentages in all variations have to be 100, so for example 30% blue color, 30% yellow color and 40% white color.
lightSettings
Lighting assignment ID for the vehicles defined in carcols. Usually if you use 0 or 1 the lights are ok, but some vehicles need customized lights, but add custom lights without replacing existing ones is more complex so I may explain you this later in different tutorial.
sirenSettings
Siren assignment ID for the vehicle defined in carcols. This value is different than zero only on vehicles as police which have sirens. Each value have different sirens behaviors and positions which are set in carcols file. If you are replacing vehicle with sirens, replace this line as well and it should work until the author didn’t made custom siren settings. I will explain details of editing of these settings in another tutorial.
Editing carvariations data
That’s it as I promised, this time it was much shorter. Let’s change these data for our Lambo even that we don’t need it, but we want to keep the settings that author prepare for us as we believe they are best options. BTW don’t believe every author and feel free to add your own taste and set up colors that you like on exact vehicle. It’s just changing of ID, it’s very easy.
I usually keep original license plate settings so I’m mostly replacing only colors and kits except the vehicles with sirens. Let’s open our carvariations from your working folder and copy only the colors section which means from <colors> to </colors>. Why not kits lines ? Because we renamed our archive with tuning parts and replaced the original, so we made it easiest way which is as well best for smooth game running.
Move to the OpenIV, using search tool find the carvariations.meta and open first location of our mpexecutive carvariations in editor as always. Find the reaper and mark the same lines as in moded carvariations, what means only colors. This time it’s just one colors variations so it’s pretty short. Paste new data, hit that Save button and repeat this step in second location. That’s it, we are all done and we changed all vehicles data properly.
How to use different vehicle’s tuning archive
This have nothing to do with our Lambo as we was replacing model which already was using tuning parts. But what if we choose model that don’t have any tuning parts, but our mod have tuning parts and we want to use them ?
Let’s stay in this mpexecutive dlc. I will now choose for example XLS which is suv but that doesn’t matter and we want that car use any tuning parts even that it don’t have any. First what we have to do is choose any tuning part archive that we are not using. You can add new tuning parts but it’s such complicated that I’m not going into guiding you to do so now. If you’re replacing vehicle and not adding new one, it’s blsht and there is easier way, this way.
Easier way is use the archive of different vehicle. Would that remove tuning parts from that second vehicle ? Yes it will. But while you are replacing lot of vehicles and most of them are in x64e you sometimes replace vehicle which is using tuning with the mod without any tuning.
Most important info here is that the archive with tuning parts have to be located in same directory. That mean’s in our case we want add tuning parts into vehicle located in mpexecutive dlc. The archive with tuning parts that we are going to choose can’t be used with vehicle located for example in x64e or in mplowrider dlc. It have to be any of the vehicles from mpexecutive or it will not work as game would not be able to find this archive.
So if you want to try this to learn it and not only read it, make backup of your mods folder to don’t mess up your new Lambo and after you learn this you can paste backup back into GTA root folder to delete all changes we will do there now.
So I choose that we want add tuning for XLS and we will bring our Reaper tuning parts. So lets use whole Lambo to replace XLS even that’s a different type of vehicle. First of all rename your reaper model files to xls and replace vehicle, vehicles.meta and handling.meta data as you learned in previous parts. Don’t do nothing with _mods.rpf file ! Don’t rename reaper_mods file and don’t touch this file this time, replace only XLS model for our Lambo mod.
I’ll give you a bit time to do this…
Ok, you’re back and you did it properly right ? Test your game if the XLS is now Lambo to make sure you did all steps correctly. I know you for sure did, so let’s move to tuning. So normally we have to use our tuning parts from mod to replace any vanilla archive which we already did before as we replaced reaper_mods with our downloaded tuning. We as well replaced the carcols data to make tuning parts appear on right places.
Now we have to force XLS to use Reaper’s tuning. To do this search in OpenIV for carvariations.meta. As we stays in same dlc you know which 2 locations are our files located in. Open first one in editor and search for ‘xls’. Now lets scroll thru the colors until you see <kits>. There is used 0_default_modkits which is mostly used when vehicle don’t have any tuning. Sometimes it’s more specific like low or suv instead of default but still with number zero. That means it don’t have any visual mods but it have different stat tunings for example for lowrider you have different suspension customizations than for suv.
So everything we have to do is change this one line. Do you remember what number is reaper using for it’s tuning ? No ? You can check it in carcols.meta but for now, I will write it to you. Reaper is using number 139 and whole kits line is ‘139_reaper_modkit’. All you have to do is copy and paste this over the ‘0_default_modkit’. Click Save and repeat this in second location.
You done, you just replaced vehicle with no tuning with vehicle that have tuning. One more thing to do while you are doing this trick. In our case both XLS and Reaper are now Lambo, but normally the vehicle that you take tuning archive from will be different vehicle no matter if vanilla or moded. To avoid this car spawning with tuning parts that will not fit you have to turn them off.
To do so simply go back into carvariations, in our case it’s one located in mpexecutive. Open in it editor and search for the reaper. Scroll down thru the colors until you see the kits. All you have to do is opposite what you did on XLS. So copy default kits line which is ‘0_default_modkit’ and paste it over ‘139_reaper_modkit’. Click Save, repeat for second location and you are done. Now reaper don’t have any tuning and XLS use this tuning parts with no problem.
Whole point here is that tuning archive have to be from same location. It’s a bit harder for dlc vehicles like this as you don’t have many vehicles to choose from but most of the vehicles are in x64e which use x64i archive for tuning parts and there is lot of vehicles to choose from. Simply you turn off tuning from one vehicle and use it on another from same location.
It’s easy like that. I believe you learned something today and I’m pretty sure you don’t want your XLS to be Lambo, so don’t forgot put back your mods folder backup to have back fully working Lambo as reaper. This is last part from level 1 serie. In second level I may learn you some extra functions on moded vehicles and first of them we can learn on this our Lambo. This first function is working wipers, so keep an eye for next tutorial to get your Lambo on next level.