VMS Summary for Vehicle Developers - pnwparksfan/vms-doc GitHub Wiki

(This guide is a Work In Progress)

VMS+ uses emissive liveries to display and change messages on vehicles in GTA V. This can be used for vehicle-mounted or trailer-mounted message boards, speed radar vehicle displays, arrow boards, etc.

Each individual "message" or phase of a sequence is a single texture. The VMS+ script works by changing the livery of the vehicle to cycle through different messages. The UI for the mod allows users to select pre-defined sequences, and allows them to create new custom message sequences to mix and match different textures for different lengths of time.

To use VMS+, a model must have the following:

• Must be multi-livery enabled in vehicles.meta
• Must use the vehicle_paint4_emissive shader on the material used for the message board
• Must not use the vehicle_paint3, vehicle_paint4, or other similar shaders which are used for normal multi-livery vehicles. See this guide for more details.

You can have up to 30 livery textures in a standard vehicle's YTD file, which means you can have 1 blank message texture, and up to 29 different messages. You can have a nearly-unlimited quantity of message textures by using a livery modkit – a detailed guide on this method will be written later.

It is very important that VMS models have proper LODs, with at minimum L0, L1, and L2 defined. You will want to add various details to your message board up-close, like LED textures and dividers between individual sections or lights on the board. At farther distances, those details make it very difficult to read the message. Applying different textures and meshes at lower LODs ensures that the messages are clear even when viewed from far away. (TODO: Add specific examples of textures)