Emergency lights

Does a police car, ambulance or fire truck flash the wrong lights in game? Usually two vehicles share one siren ID, and the game only uses one of the two patterns. Emergency lights finds those clashes and gives each vehicle its own number.

The page walks you through four steps: Open your project › Check the lights › Fix problems › Test in game.

1. Check

Open your vehicle project and click Check my project. Or click Check another folder… to check any folder of vehicle resources. It takes a few seconds and changes nothing.

The result is one of:

• All lights are fine — every emergency vehicle has its own light pattern.
• N light problems found — listed under The problems, for example 1. police2 and sheriff share light number 42. Each one shows which vehicle keeps the number and which gets a new one.
• No emergency lights found — none of the vehicles has a carcols.meta with sirens. Pick the folder that holds your emergency vehicles.

Also needs a look lists problems the studio can’t fix by itself, such as:

• has a carcols.meta with siren sets, but the fxmanifest has no data_file ‘CARCOLS_FILE’ line, so the sirens never load. Add the line to the resource’s fxmanifest.lua.
• has a carvariations.meta, but the fxmanifest has no data_file ‘VEHICLE_VARIATION_FILE’ line… Same fix, other line.
• … has N lights; the game only uses the first 20.

The same set shipped twice with identical content is not a problem: it is listed under notes as Harmless: every copy flashes the same.

2. Fix

Click Fix it (or Fix all). The studio confirms what changes, then gives each clashing vehicle a new, unused siren ID (starting from 10000), in its carcols.meta and in the carvariations.meta of that vehicle. Nothing else in the files changes; comments and formatting are kept.

Every changed file is copied first to <file>.noxbak.

3. Test in game

The game reads light settings only when a resource starts. Restart the changed resources (or the server) and look at the lights. Still wrong? Click Check again.

Advanced

• Also compare with the rest of my server — also finds clashes between your vehicles and other packs on the server. Only your vehicles get new numbers. Tick Include resources that server.cfg does not start if your vehicles are started by txAdmin or a script.
• Undo my fixes… — puts every changed file back from its backup.
• Every light setup — every siren set found, with its ID. Type a number and click Set to give one a number of your own. Numbers already in use are refused.