modding HUGE Problem with Modding RDR2 That No One is Talking About

[deadwoodd 6]

Unfortunately it seems that a lot of people are falling for the misinformation being spread by the "RDR2 Spawn Fix" mod. This is not a viable solution to the spawning issue. Since the mod author has been consistently deleting comments that are meant to inform the public about the issues this mod creates, misinformation like this starts spreading wildly.

 

There have been a few of us that have proven to syyyke that his mod does indeed break many aspects of the game. What this mod does is give you the visual satisfaction of seeing chickens and passengers. This does not fix the inherent issue that creates spawning issues, which is the utilization of incorrect/improper texture compression formats. We have tested this and know its the case because you can take mods such as WhyEm's DLC or EEE, properly compress their textures, and then have a perfectly working game.

 

If you are forcing low priority spawns to become a higher priority, this does not change the fact that the engine is still starved for resources. If the game does not have enough resources and you are forcing these spawns to happen, it's going to take resources from other aspects of this game. This can result in massive amounts of culling, broken ped behavior, broken ambient spawns, broken random encounters, broken dialogue trees, and broken scene animations/vignettes. Actually, the problems this mod creates are so severe that most of it is easy to replicate.

 

You can't brute force spawns and not expect there to be any additional problems. The engine is preventing those spawns for a reason. What do you think is going to happen by forcing spawns that the game already had trouble handling? It's now going to have trouble handling a whole lot more.

 

Chuck's analogy is absolutely 100% correct. Do you think a room is clean if you sweep all the garbage under the table? Obviously not. And that is what this mod does.

 

There is absolutely ZERO evidence that the streaming method is what causes these issues. However, what there IS evidence of, is texture compression being a primary culprit.

 

Take a broken mod, change it's install.xml to use filereplacement - the mod is still broken.

Take that same mod, re-compress its textures - the mod is fixed. Whether you use streaming or file replacement.

TTO is a great example of this. It's a 20gb texture mod. Go ahead and use the streaming method, and I guarantee you will not have any issues. If you do have issues, its because of another mod. This is because the mod author actually compressed his textures (using BC7, which is not even the best compression format, but it still works because all of the textures are compressed.

 

Let's use this mod as an example. A 300mb hat retexture. This will almost always create spawning issues. Change it to utilize file replacement - spawns are still broken. If we properly compress both textures using basically ANY OTHER FORMAT (including BC7), the spawning issues disappear.

 

This is because during the time where most of these mods were first created, the spawning issue was not well known, so modders were using the fastest/easiest form of compression. No fault on the OG mod authors, as no one really knew anything.

 

Also, a gameconfig will NOT fix your issues. No matter what. Period. RDR2's gameconfig does not work the same way as GTA 5's. Actually, a majority of the values you can change in GTA 5 have zero affect on RDR2. You can raise resource pools all you want, but the issue will still ALWAYS be present.

Edited January 4 by deadwoodd

[JKL409 8]

14 minutes ago, deadwoodd said:

Unfortunately it seems that a lot of people are falling for the misinformation being spread by the "RDR2 Spawn Fix" mod. This is not a viable solution to the spawning issue. Since the mod author has been consistently deleting comments that are meant to inform the public about the issues this mod creates, misinformation like this starts spreading wildly.

 

There have been a few of us that have proven to syyyke that his mod does indeed break many aspects of the game. What this mod does is give you the visual satisfaction of seeing chickens and passengers. This does not fix the inherent issue that creates spawning issues, which is the utilization of incorrect/improper texture compression formats. We have tested this and know its the case because you can take mods such as WhyEm's DLC or EEE, properly compress their textures, and then have a perfectly working game.

 

If you are forcing low priority spawns to become a higher priority, this does not change the fact that the engine is still starved for resources. If the game does not have enough resources and you are forcing these spawns to happen, it's going to take resources from other aspects of this game. This can result in massive amounts of culling, broken ambient spawns, broken random encounters, broken dialogue trees, and broken scene animations/vignettes. Actually, the problems this mod creates are so severe that most of it is easy to replicate.

 

You can't brute force spawns and not expect there to be any additional problems. The engine is preventing those spawns for a reason. What do you think is going to happen by forcing spawns that the game already had trouble handling? It's now going to have trouble handling a whole lot more.

 

Chuck's analogy is absolutely 100% correct. Do you think a room is clean if you sweep all the garbage under the table? Obviously not. And that is what this mod does.

 

There is absolutely ZERO evidence that the streaming method is what causes these issues. However, what there IS evidence of, is texture compression being a primary culprit.

 

Take a broken mod, change it's install.xml to use filereplacement - the mod is still broken.

Take that same mod, re-compress its textures - the mod is fixed. Whether you use streaming or file replacement.

 

This is because during the time where most of these mods were first created, the spawning issue was not well known, so modders were using the fastest/easiest form of compression. No fault on the OG mod authors, as none of us knew anything.

 

Also, a gameconfig will NOT fix your issues. No matter what. Period. RDR2's gameconfig does not work the same way as GTA 5's. Actually, a majority of the values you can change in GTA 5 have zero affect on RDR2. You can raise resource pools all you want, but the issue will still ALWAYS be present.

If the solution is as simple as recompressing textures, then why hasn't this universally been done, leading to us being able to use as many mods as we want..? 

[deadwoodd 6]

2 minutes ago, JKL409 said:

If the solution is as simple as recompressing textures, then why hasn't this universally been done, leading to us being able to use as many mods as we want..? 

That is exactly what has been done, although most of it has been shared privately (some sort of RDR2 modder drama, I don't know, it's cringe). Also, most of the older mod authors have unfortunately either stopped modding/playing the game, or have stopped publicly sharing their mods.

[JKL409 8]

4 minutes ago, deadwoodd said:

That is exactly what has been done, although most of it has been shared privately (some sort of RDR2 modder drama, I don't know, it's cringe). Also, most of the older mod authors have unfortunately either stopped modding/playing the game, or have stopped publicly sharing their mods.

So if you're saying it's as simple as recompressing files why can't something like a python program be created to do this process automatically. 

 

That way modder drama wouldn't be necessary.

[deadwoodd 6]

6 minutes ago, JKL409 said:

So if you're saying it's as simple as recompressing files why can't something like a python program be created to do this process automatically. 

 

That way modder drama wouldn't be necessary.

Sure you can do that if you want, although I know nothing about Python so can't really speak much about it. It should be easily do-able using the RDR2 Texture Toolkit though.

[JKL409 8]

Okay, so what format is best and how are we compressing these textures? 

 

If you're in a modding group with others also discussing this perhaps let me know the details.

[deadwoodd 6]

40 minutes ago, JKL409 said:

Okay, so what format is best and how are we compressing these textures? 

 

If you're in a modding group with others also discussing this perhaps let me know the details.

I would suggest joining the RDR2Mods discord because most of this has been thoroughly looked at and disected by a bunch of different people, most of which are veteran modders smarter than me. The compression method used depends on the type of texture we're dealing with. Here's some info from Xuru who is a respected mod author.

 

Quote

usually, its bc1 srgb for diffuse textures, bc1 linear for normal maps, bc3 linear for pbr textures (usually they'll use bc1 linear if they dont have an alpha channel)

some normal maps use bc3 though, if they have an alpha channel

and there are a few ones that use bc5, they're distinguishable by not having a blue channel

 

[DeathWrench 2]

8 hours ago, JKL409 said:

Okay, so what format is best and how are we compressing these textures? 

 

If you're in a modding group with others also discussing this perhaps let me know the details.

Whatever compression method the original texture uses. 

[Chunk the chump 20]

what we think right now as "bad compression" is the A8RGB8 or whatever textures compression.

 

11 hours ago, deadwoodd said:

Unfortunately it seems that a lot of people are falling for the misinformation being spread by the "RDR2 Spawn Fix" mod. This is not a viable solution to the spawning issue. Since the mod author has been consistently deleting comments that are meant to inform the public about the issues this mod creates, misinformation like this starts spreading wildly.

 

There have been a few of us that have proven to syyyke that his mod does indeed break many aspects of the game. What this mod does is give you the visual satisfaction of seeing chickens and passengers. This does not fix the inherent issue that creates spawning issues, which is the utilization of incorrect/improper texture compression formats. We have tested this and know its the case because you can take mods such as WhyEm's DLC or EEE, properly compress their textures, and then have a perfectly working game.

 

If you are forcing low priority spawns to become a higher priority, this does not change the fact that the engine is still starved for resources. If the game does not have enough resources and you are forcing these spawns to happen, it's going to take resources from other aspects of this game. This can result in massive amounts of culling, broken ped behavior, broken ambient spawns, broken random encounters, broken dialogue trees, and broken scene animations/vignettes. Actually, the problems this mod creates are so severe that most of it is easy to replicate.

 

You can't brute force spawns and not expect there to be any additional problems. The engine is preventing those spawns for a reason. What do you think is going to happen by forcing spawns that the game already had trouble handling? It's now going to have trouble handling a whole lot more.

 

Chuck's analogy is absolutely 100% correct. Do you think a room is clean if you sweep all the garbage under the table? Obviously not. And that is what this mod does.

 

There is absolutely ZERO evidence that the streaming method is what causes these issues. However, what there IS evidence of, is texture compression being a primary culprit.

 

Take a broken mod, change it's install.xml to use filereplacement - the mod is still broken.

Take that same mod, re-compress its textures - the mod is fixed. Whether you use streaming or file replacement.

TTO is a great example of this. It's a 20gb texture mod. Go ahead and use the streaming method, and I guarantee you will not have any issues. If you do have issues, its because of another mod. This is because the mod author actually compressed his textures (using BC7, which is not even the best compression format, but it still works because all of the textures are compressed.

 

Let's use this mod as an example. A 300mb hat retexture. This will almost always create spawning issues. Change it to utilize file replacement - spawns are still broken. If we properly compress both textures using basically ANY OTHER FORMAT (including BC7), the spawning issues disappear.

 

This is because during the time where most of these mods were first created, the spawning issue was not well known, so modders were using the fastest/easiest form of compression. No fault on the OG mod authors, as no one really knew anything.

 

Also, a gameconfig will NOT fix your issues. No matter what. Period. RDR2's gameconfig does not work the same way as GTA 5's. Actually, a majority of the values you can change in GTA 5 have zero affect on RDR2. You can raise resource pools all you want, but the issue will still ALWAYS be present.

what a great post I think we can just link to this from now on every time someone brings up ''spawn fix''

[Chungo 4]

20 hours ago, Chunk the chump said:

Hi,

I know there are a lot of misinformation going around with Streaming Vs FIlereplacement right now, and some of it can be contributed to me as I was a believer at some point that streaming indeed can cause issues, but it seems like that is not the case.

 

I will have a video about this in the upcoming days to clarify things but for now please do not look to FIle Replacement as a definitive fix for any spawn issues if you have any.

 

And also please please do not believe  in these ''spawn fixes'' made by syyke, those mods break the game more than anything else by forcing peds to spawn of trolleys and trains. This does not fix any issues if your game is struggling with ped culling already. The author employs heavy censorship in the nexus modpage, deleting every negative comment essentially tricking people to believe that the mod is amazing and better than in reality.

 

Right now the more educated part of the modding community thinks that the cause of spawn issues is incorrect texture compression method employed by a lot of authors in the past.

 

For example the newest update of Terrain Textures Overhaul contain over 20gb of textures and they all work flawlessly without problems at least while testing for spawn issues in the short term.

You are not the first modder who call out that syyyke fella for his total bullshit. Not only the author deletes comments which report issues on a daily basis, he 'updates" the mod everyday, adding nothing and fixing nothing of course, he does it just to make sure the mod is kept afloat and hot in the main page.

 

Anything for clout. And people desperately and stupidly fall for this.

[Chungo 4]

20 hours ago, JKL409 said:

I've tested Syyke's spawn fix mod a fair bit, and so far it seems to be working extremely well, with no issues. Saying it simply doesn't work and just breaks the game makes your argument seem silly, as clearly it is working for some people at least. 

 

In regards to your point about the latest Terrain Textures Overhaul mod, that mod doesn't use high resolution upscaled textures but instead replaces them entirely with new ones, so there would be no additional strain on the engine.

"It is working for some people at least". I think you sound way more silly than he is.

 

Okay, it's working for some people, sure, I guess. Let's then ignore the dozens of folks with deleted comments who did not found it useful at all, but detrimental. Why does the author sell it like it's the definite and ultimate super fix if it just "works for some people at least"?

 

Some of us are just advicing anybody who comes in here to beware, since that mod is far from being the complete and definitive solution to fixing spawns, and more importantly, so everybody can read here the comments he would have deleted and actually deleted over Nexus.

[Chungo 4]

19 hours ago, JKL409 said:

Look, it's clearly not the kind of fix GTAV got when the whole dissappearing DLC cars and other such issues started cropping up. But... For now it's a significant jump over anything else we've had, and clearly the developer has done quite a bit of research and testing.

 

So I'm not gonna shit all over the guy for making a good attempt at fixing the issue. No other fixes exist, if creators want to come up with their own rival fix methods that's fine, but they haven't.

Other fixes existing or not have absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the mod doesn't do what it says it does. No, trams don't work like they should. No, trains don't work like they should. No, peds don't behave like they should. If you are okay with another placebo solution and want to desperately fall for this, that's on you, friend. It's super cute you are compassionate and all about the poor fella, but you clearly don't know what you are talking about. I don't even think you get what Chunk is saying. There is no witch hunt here, you are making it seem like we are putting all our hatred on some guy at random. 

[Chungo 4]

13 hours ago, JKL409 said:

Okay, so what format is best and how are we compressing these textures? 

 

If you're in a modding group with others also discussing this perhaps let me know the details.

Why are so entitled and childish? Read through the last pages of this thread and you'll find lots of valuable information on this subject. It's also been talked about a lot over the Discord server. 

 

But please all of you who come here to talk wonders about "spawns fix" mod, refrain from spreading more misinformation. Thank you.

[Osoa 3]

On 1/3/2025 at 8:24 AM, Edegon said:

You shouldn't use the stream folder at all, you get mods mixed up, at least use the auto-installer in ModManager to keep them in separate folders.
Anyway here's the files, I hope the instructions are clear enough:

JMOptimizedPack.7z 40.67 kB · 4 downloads

 

Looks great - your QoL folder's streaming folder filelist seems to be missing a ton of files from the original mod. Is this intentional?

[BitTitan 2]

On 1/5/2025 at 4:06 AM, Chunk the chump said:

what we think right now as "bad compression" is the A8RGB8 or whatever textures compression.

 

So looking through my mod list and Ambient Gangs, Arthur Morgan Outfit Overhaul,  Better Forearm, all use B8G8R8A8.

 

So they should have their compression redone according to Xuru's identification (or better yet, matching the orginal textures compression method when it's a replacement vs new)

[deadwoodd 6]

On 1/7/2025 at 10:31 PM, BitTitan said:

So looking through my mod list and Ambient Gangs, Arthur Morgan Outfit Overhaul,  Better Forearm, all use B8G8R8A8.

 

So they should have their compression redone according to Xuru's identification (or better yet, matching the orginal textures compression method when it's a replacement vs new)

 

Also, to be clear, B8G8R8A8 is essentially the same as being uncompressed. This format gives the best quality because it is lossless.

[CatchAWave 2]

On 1/5/2025 at 11:52 AM, Chungo said:

Why are so entitled and childish? Read through the last pages of this thread and you'll find lots of valuable information on this subject. It's also been talked about a lot over the Discord server. 

 

But please all of you who come here to talk wonders about "spawns fix" mod, refrain from spreading more misinformation. Thank you.

 

I actually was in a brief correspondence with the mod author, troubleshooting the issues I had with the mod. I then redirected him to this thread so he could see your discussions about the texture compression issues. He responded with: "Thanks for linking a thread where people are shit talking me and my mods".

 

Now I'm blocked from his mod page. What an ass.

[Chungo 4]

On 1/9/2025 at 7:37 PM, CatchAWave said:

 

I actually was in a brief correspondence with the mod author, troubleshooting the issues I had with the mod. I then redirected him to this thread so he could see your discussions about the texture compression issues. He responded with: "Thanks for linking a thread where people are shit talking me and my mods".

 

Now I'm blocked from his mod page. What an ass.

The worst and most embarrassing thing about swindlers and tricksters are their followers. They think without hesitation that a random dude, out of nowhere, came with the ultimate fix for everything. And that is what give those tricksters the fame and reputation, based solely on their lies and those braindead enough to follow them. I've seen everything.

[KingEdward 0]

so are the big graphics mods scam as well ?

[deadwoodd 6]

8 hours ago, KingEdward said:

so are the big graphics mods scam as well ?

If you're talking about Visual Redemption, WhyEm's Visuals, etc.. no. Any mod like this won't have any affect on spawns and is perfectly okay to use.

[KingEdward 0]

3 hours ago, deadwoodd said:

If you're talking about Visual Redemption, WhyEm's Visuals, etc.. no. Any mod like this won't have any affect on spawns and is perfectly okay to use.

What about weather systems could they cause problems ? Not just with spawns ai ped behavior in general

[deadwoodd 6]

12 hours ago, KingEdward said:

What about weather systems could they cause problems ? Not just with spawns ai ped behavior in general

Also totally fine. Editing timescales/length of days and nights may potentially cause some weirdness, but that would need further testing. I believe it would be fine but not 100% sure.

[KingEdward 0]

On 11/4/2024 at 7:52 PM, Edegon said:

I think someone should make a clear guide on how to solve the problem yourself with the methods that have been found so far (texture compression, install.xml replacement method, etc...), or at least a summary of the findings, since a few days ago I read the whole thread but it's very long and a bit hard to digest mentally to understand what to do (besides being very time consuming). And since it's very long the important things are scattered and hard to find, even though I read it all.

I'd do the guide/summary myself but I don't know how to make the install.xml with the replacement method instead of the streaming one, but I understand why streaming the mod files causes the problems.
I also have problems turning some .dds files back to a .ytd using RDR2TextureTool. I know there's a solution but I can't find it explained clearly.

This is a fast and easy method I use for checking if the mods are causing spawning problems:

• I use this clean Ch. 2 save file that was referenced in this thread but not linked yet (I think), with Rampage and Railroad Engineer installed: https://www.nexusmods.com/reddeadredemption2/mods/4015
  (For newcomers, it has been said that save files could get corrupted in some way by some mods, so it's better to use a clean save.) I recommend disabling autosave if you plan on doing many tests.
• After loading I open Rampage and go on "World" and activate the ESP in "Ped Manager" and "Vehicle Manager".
• Then I activate No Clip (in Miscellaneous), set max speed and go check if EVERY train shown on the map spawns and if ped spawns are normal too on trains and trams.
• Since you move very fast at max speed with No Clip the train might not spawn at first due to this. If that's the case then wait a few seconds for the game to load the area where you are, then fly away from where the train should spawn while looking at the railroad, after moving away the right distance you should see the train spawn.

This method works 100% of the time for me, and could be included in the guide on how to solve the problem if the experts here agree that it's good (because I'm no expert), since it's very quick and easy.

I also read that graphic settings could contribute to the problem, I play in 1440p with high-ultra settings.

 

 

 

so using this method i was able to find a few trains that wouldn't spawn i mean up until this point i taught my spawns are pretty good was seeing chickens and peds on trollys so now im going to remove my mods one by one ending with graphics ones until i get all the trains to spawn

 

this is my mod list 

[KingEdward 0]

why am i not surprised that it was whyem's

[KingEdward 0]

just tried this one https://www.nexusmods.com/reddeadredemption2/mods/4987?tab=files&file_id=17591 and it just kills my trains but what i dont understand is how come TTO gets away with it being roughly the same size ?