How to change textures and logos inside a Fiv3Devs MLO

Every Fiv3Devs MLO ships with a customizable surface. Logos, signage, posters, the branding on a club stage, the screen content on a dispatch monitor — all of it lives in a .ytd texture dictionary you can open, edit, and repack. This article shows you how, explains the edge cases, and tells you when Escrow stops you.

The short version

1. Open the MLO’s stream folder in OpenIV or CodeWalker RPF Explorer.
2. Find the .ytd file that contains the texture you want to change.
3. Replace the texture with your own image (same name, same dimensions).
4. Save the .ytd back into the stream folder.
5. Restart the server.

If you know the drill, that’s it. The rest of this article covers the “why” and the “what if”.

What a .ytd actually is

A .ytd — YTD = Texture Dictionary — is a container holding every texture used by a 3D model or group of models. Textures are the images applied to surfaces: a marble texture on a floor, a neon logo on a sign, a brand on a staff uniform. When GTA V renders a room, it looks up textures by name inside the relevant .ytd.

In a Fiv3Devs MLO, the stream/ folder contains the .ytd files that ship the map’s visual surface. Everything customizable — logos, artwork, menus, UI screens — is in one of those.

What you can customize

You can edit any texture that belongs to a custom-made 3D object. The object in question owns its own .ytd, so changing the texture only affects that object, nowhere else in the game.

You cannot edit:

• Embedded textures baked into 3D models. These are encrypted along with the model under Tebex Escrow. That’s the trade-off for protecting our geometry from being stolen.
• Textures on vanilla GTA objects. Some interior props are spawned from the base game to keep file size down. If you swap a texture on a base-game prop, you affect every instance of that prop across your entire server — the floor of the club would also become the floor of the pharmacy. Don’t do it.

The product page of every release calls out which textures are customizable by name.

Tools

Pick one. They all do the same job.

• OpenIV — the classic GTA V modding tool. Easiest UX.
• CodeWalker — includes an RPF Explorer that can open, edit, and save resource files. Great if you already use CodeWalker for other work.
• A specialized texture editor — anything that can export .dds/.png images.

Step-by-step: replace a logo

1. Open the MLO folder. Drill into stream/. You’ll see multiple .ytd files named by area — for example vbc_bar.ytd, vbc_signage.ytd.

2. Find the right .ytd. Open each one with your tool of choice until you find the texture you want to replace. Texture names inside a .ytd are descriptive — vbc_logo_dif, poster_A, screen_main and so on.

3. Export the current texture. Right-click → Export. Use it as a size and aspect reference for your replacement.

4. Make your replacement. In Photoshop, GIMP, Photopea, whatever — produce a new image at the same resolution. Keep the format compatible (PNG is fine for OpenIV; a .dds works too for advanced users).

5. Import the replacement. Right-click → Import → replace the existing texture, keeping the same name. This is critical — the MLO’s material references the texture by name, and a rename will break the link.

6. Save the .ytd. Your tool will re-pack the archive. Put it back into the MLO’s stream/ folder (if you opened it in place, this happened automatically).

7. Restart the server. Client caches may need a reconnect to pick up the new texture.

If your texture shows up in-game as flickering patches or weird colour bleeding, the texture likely wasn’t saved correctly inside the .ytd — recheck the name, resolution, and that the save actually committed.

About those “purple” and “grey” scale-map textures

You’ll find two specific kinds of textures in most MLOs that don’t look like images: they look like a purple swatch or a grey gradient. These are detail maps — normal maps, specular maps, roughness maps. They tell the engine how light reacts to the surface, not what colour it is.

If you only want to replace a logo, you can ignore the detail maps and just replace the colour texture. If you replace a detail map with a flat transparent or solid image, you’ll lose a bit of material realism (the surface will look flatter) but nothing will break.

If you want to fully rebrand a surface including its material behaviour, you’ll want to learn how to paint a normal map — YouTube has plenty of 5-minute tutorials on the basics.

Animated textures (scrolling screens, etc.)

GTA V doesn’t support video or GIF directly. The animations you see on club screens, billboard boards, and dispatch displays are actually a sprite sheet — multiple frames packed into a single texture, scrolled by the material shader.

To change an animation:

1. Open the animated texture in the .ytd.
2. Overwrite each frame inside it with your replacement frame, keeping the layout identical.
3. Save and restart.

If you replace every frame with the same image, the “animation” becomes a static image. That’s fine if you just want a logo instead of a scrolling ad.

Missing textures and glitches

If an object starts flickering or rendering with the wrong surface, the material is missing a texture. The engine falls back to whatever texture is nearby, which is why the glitch looks like random colour bleeding. Root causes:

• You renamed a texture inside the .ytd (the material still looks for the old name).
• You deleted a texture from the .ytd.
• The .ytd save didn’t commit — check the file size changed on disk.

Restore the texture with its original name and the flicker stops.

Video walkthrough

We recorded the whole procedure on our Headquarters MLO. The file names change between MLOs but the procedure doesn’t: watch on YouTube. A transparent image for detail-map replacement is linked in the video description.

What Escrow will refuse

If you ever hit a “this file is protected” error, the file is encrypted — we can’t change that, and neither can any third-party tool (legal ones, anyway). The trade is simple: Escrow protects the work we put into building the MLO, and in exchange we design the customizable surface to cover everything a well-run RP server typically needs. If something you genuinely need to customize isn’t in the customizable surface, tell us in Discord — we sometimes expose a new customization slot in a patch.

Happy customizing.