A tutorial on how to make your game break-proof.

[Shnockered1]

This is a tutorial to help noobs combat common issues, and to make their game rock-solid stable. If you pay attention to everything I will be sharing with you, whatever issues you may have will be a thing of the past.....forever.

1.) Whatever copy you have of GTA V, you need to make another copy of it, and place it on another hard drive - or if you don't have another hard drive - create a new folder on your desktop, name it GTA V BackUp, and paste the entire GTA V game folder there. This will ensure that no matter what may happen in the future, you have a way to troubleshoot your sh*t.

2.) If you don't already have one, create a folder in your game folder, and name it "mods" without the quotes. It must be spelled exactly as you see it - all lower case letters. Copy and paste x64a.rpf through x64w.rpf, the update folder, and your x64 folder into the mods folder that you just created. From this point forward, any and all modifications will go only into the contents of the mods folder. The reason for this is to prevent crashes, and to prevent you from having to re-mod your game everytime R* springs an update on you. Just know that anytime you add a mod to the vanilla .rpfs, it will change the hash values, and if so, it could cause a CTD. VERY IMPORTANT: Create a folder on your desktop, and name it "Mods To Put Back After GTA V Update". Launch OpenIV, and go to update/update.rpf/common/data and extract all modifications you have to the folder you just created on your desktop. Inside the folder you just created on desktop, create more folders that mirror the subdirectories inside OpenIV update/update.rpf/common/data/ action, ai, effects, levels, etc, and extract whatever mods you have in those subdirectories to the mirrored subdirectories you created into the folder you created on your desktop. Do this every time, you add ANY mod to this directory or any of it's subdirectories. We do this, so that when R* does update, it's a simple matter of dragging all those files back to the newly updated.rpf, eliminating any guess-work, on what mods need to go back.

3.) When R* springs an update on you, four things will happen. Your update.rpf inside your update folder, gtav.exe, gta5launcher.exe, and your installers folder will be updated. You can see this, by opening your game folder, right-clicking inside that folder, and sort by date, and change view to detailed. By doing so, all files and folders will be displayed in order by the latest timestamp first, and you will notice that said files and folders would obviously have Today's date on them. For example, R* updated their patch on 6/7/2016, so you would see that date next to these files and folders, and that is how you will know what got updated.

4.) If you are like me, and do not want these updates to happen to you at all, you need to open the game folder, right-click on your update folder, gta5.exe, gta5launcher.exe, and the installers folder, select properties, and change to read-only. That will prevent Steam from being able to overwrite them, thus preventing the update from occuring. If at anytime, you purposefully want to update to latest version, you only havve to remember to set these back to default, and then verify gamecache from Steam/Settings.

5.) If you have already allowed the R* update BEFORE scripthookv is updated, and you wish to play with the previous version, so you can continue to use your scripts, follow the following actions -

a.) copy and gta5.exe, gta5launcher.exe, and the installers folder, from your gtav backup folder, and paste them into your default game folder - say "yes" to overwrite.

b.) open the update folder inside your gtav backup folder, and copy update.rpf, paste it into the update folder in your default game folder. Say "yes" to overwrite.

c.) now go to C:\Program Files (x86)\Rockstar Games\Social Club, and run the uninstallRGSCRedistributable.exe file. This will uninstall the latest social club that had just got updated.

d.) now go inside your installers folder in your default game folder, and run the newest version of the socialclub installer.

e.) now open up the "Mods To Put Back After GTA V Update" folder I had you create on your desktop. Drag all your mods back to their respective destinations.

f.) launch the game as normal, and it will load just as it always had.

6.) For the sake of stability, make sure you do NOT have any conflicts between in-game settings and your graphic card's settings. Launch nVida or whatever graphic card you are using settings, and compare them to what you have set in-game. For example you do not want to tell your graphic card to do vSynch if your in-game settings are already set to do this. Same goes for any other variable,such as anisotropic filtering. Make dead-sure that no two settings are duplicated.

7.) Make sure you have all the latest Microsoft C++ redistributables, both x86 and x64, along with the latest version of .net framework. If you do not know how to find these, google it. I am not going to do all your thinking for you.

If you follow the steps I provided from an existing working copy of your game, you will NEVER have another issue again, UNLESS you mod your sh*t wrong. If you do mod your sh*t wrong, remove the mods folder, and boot the game. If it loads up, it obviously means you did something wrong in your mods folder, and then it's just a matter of isolating the culprit.