A Rockstar-approved GTA 5 modding tool is on the cars, I mean cards, for all of you PC players out there.
Earlier this month, and several years after the launch of Grand Theft Auto 5’s enhanced edition on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, the game’s next-gen features finally arrived on PC as part of a free update for all existing users.
Now, Cfx.re – that is to say, the team Rockstar hired in 2023, and which was behind the popular GTA 5 FiveM and RDR2 RedM multiplayer mods – is working on a “conversion tool” which will “assist the modding community in making their assets compatible with the new upgrade”. This is as any custom assets used on FiveM and GTA 5 Legacy are not “natively compatible” with Rockstar’s newly-launched PC version of GTA 5 Enhanced.
As laid out by Cfx.re, the team’s upcoming conversion tool will support the following formats:
- Dictionaries of multiple drawables (*.ydd)
- Generic models, geometry, optional embedded textures and lights (*.ydr)
- Complex fragmented skeletons/models used for pedestrians, vehicles, destructible objects, etc. (*.yft)
- Texture Dictionaries (also known as TXD) (*ytd.)
Cfx.re noted file types such as .ycd and .ybn will not require any conversion.
The tool itself does not have a release date as yet, with Cfx.re stating it still has a few bits and pieces it needs to sort out before it is ready to be debuted. For now, it just says “coming soon”, and the team said it will share a more thorough breakdown of what the tool will include at a later date.
As to why this is a pretty big deal, well, Rockstar has been rather strict with mods in the past. Back in 2017, it called time on the ‘Liberty City in GTA5’ mod, saying that while it “generally [would] not take legal action against third-party projects involving Rockstar’s PC games that are single-player, non-commercial, and respect the intellectual property rights of third parties”, it would not allow “use or importation of other IP”, including its own.
Meanwhile, just this January, the creators of an impressive mod which added a playable version of Grand Theft Auto 4’s map to GTA5 removed their own project from the public eye following a discussion with Rockstar.
Following its debut on Steam, GTA 5 Enhanced has welcomed a healthy number of players. At the time of writing, there are still 108,568 of us heisting cars and getting up to who knows what over on Valve’s platform.
Despite these numbers, though, GTA5 Enhanced user reviews are still sitting with a “mixed” average on Steam.