why we can't delete main lods

[jpm1]

somebody could tell me why we can delete maps folder main wpl lods. why we can't delete anything in these files (bronx_w.wpl, manhat11.wpl...). Thx in advance

[quechus13]

Because LODs mean level of detail and if you delete those your game might crash.

[jpm1]

no lod is just a model, with lower details but it's just a model. deleting them shouldn't be problematic. i said lod but if i delete any other line, even not a lod one in these files it willl crash the same. if i delete a lod which line is contained in a wpl of an image file, the game won't crash. i was just windering why infos contained in these particular wpl can't be deleted. as you guess, i want to try removing lods and only keeping models and their superlods, and of course increasing models viewing distance

[Chipsman]

bronx_w.wpl is a parent file for all bronx_w*.wpl files in the bronx_w.img archive, these files contain hi models, each model can have a link to the lod model (which is located in the parent bronx_w.wpl) by lod index (see http://www.gtamodding.com/wiki/WPL Section 0 - INST), it's just a sequence number starting from the first line of the inst section ( see http://www.gtamodding.com/wiki/LOD for more details)

 

And now, for example, we have the following situation: in our parent file we have 100 lines with lod models, in the one of the child file we have the model which links to the 100th lod in the parent file (lod index == 99 (because we are counting from 0)), everything works, the game is happy. Now we just decided to delete few lod models (for example 5) from our parent file, and now there are 95 lines in out parent file, but when game loads it tries to load the lod with index 99, and of course it just crashes

 

so you just should to keep up lod indexes in right ranges and everything will be ok

Edited August 10, 2016 by Chipsman

[jpm1]

ok, so models can call lods using their wpl antepenultimate value. so removing lods like i planned, is almost impossible mission, or at least not good. i'd have liked to replace lods by their corresponding models, but i think i'll give it up. Thanks a lot!

Edited August 10, 2016 by jpm1