Help with my Better Draft Horses mod

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    As of 09/02/2026

    This mod is currently available on Steam:

    Better Draft Horses


    _____________________________________________________


    I'm working on a mod which aims to replace all vanilla draft horses with better looking ones I put together.

    I got to a point where the mod is almost complete, but I'm still having a few problems I can't manage to solve:



    • there's one single vanilla truck, the Telega Stake, which doesn't want to be replaced by my version. The mdl gets read as a new one and thus there are 2 Telega Stakes in game, vanilla and modified, while I want just one. Every other purchasable vehicle gets replaced correctly. Here you can see the problem.

       

      Not to mention the vanilla one has the driver playing the sitting animation, like a passenger, instead of the driving_upright one. Not that I dislike that, in fact I think I prefer it, but I'd like to know why it happens.
      How do I get my Telega Stake to replace and override the vanilla one?
    • the horse coaches models have the same problem, they don't replace the vanilla ones but spawn together with them, but in this case I think I'm simply missing some additional step, because it happens with all of them.
      How do I get my horse coaches to replace and override the vanilla ones?



    These are the 2 "critical" issues I'm having to consider the mod at least ready to use, but there's more I'd like to do in the future to better polish it:

    In order to see the problems yourself in game, I can share my mod folder somewhere here to download.
    Where should I upload it though? I see the guidelines to upload game files' stuff are strict so I want to be sure I follow the correct procedure.

    EDIT: here's the (old) download link - incomplete version: Better Draft Horse


    Thanks for reading all this and for your help!

    Edited 3 times, last by Flaconia: Added Steam Workshop link at the top ().

    Quote from Fabiano

    In order to see the problems yourself in game, I can share my mod folder somewhere here to download.
    Where should I upload it though?

    You can simply use the download section; the mods have to be approved by us moderators first anyway before they're visible to everyone. That won't happen until the mod is ready for release.


    But this way, you can better identify where the problem might be. You can also invite users there who be able to contribute if the moderator team is stuck.

    Quote from Fabiano

    the horse coaches models have the same problem, they don't replace the vanilla ones but spawn together with the

    If you mean the coaches found under Car, i.e. the AI traffic, they are incorrectly named.

    coach_01.mdl -->coach_01_v2.mdl



    If anyone else thinks they can help with any of the problems, please contact me and I'll add them to the web disk entry.

    Not all animations are used in TPF2.


    A road vehicle will not use animal animations, but drive and doors animation.


    Technical:

    A ModelInstanceList has a Transformator. Each Transformator does run the Animation.


    For RoadVehicle, we have drive + doors Animation

    For Animals, it uses a list of model_metadata::Animal -> movementTypes

    Thank you for your help.

    Quote from MaikC

    If you mean the coaches found under Car, i.e. the AI traffic, they are incorrectly named.

    coach_01.mdl -->coach_01_v2.mdl

    Ah right sorry, that was a try I did after seeing that the version with _v2 was not working.
    I've updated the download entry with cars models with _v2, or you can simply try to rename them yourself, you'll see the problem persists.


    I suspect the _v2 is not strictly needed somehow, because in this Hide vanilla vehicles mod, none of the mdl files has the _v2 but they still manage to override the vanilla purchasable models to change their availability and hide them. It's a real mistery to me how it manages to work. Maybe the game is coded so that it recognises the _v* suffix and ignores it?
    Maybe tngjstn knows how it works?


    Quote from eis_os

    A road vehicle will not use animal animations, but drive and doors animation.

    Ok, so what happens to the drive animation when the vehicle stops? Does the animation get reset to frame 0? How does the vanilla draft horse manage to go back to setup pose when it stops?

    I'm back and I've just recently managed to solve these puzzles. Here are the answers I found:


    Quote from Fabiano

    How do I get my Telega Stake to replace and override the vanilla one?

    By fiddling with the Legacy Vehicles mod from Urban Games (which, correct me if I'm wrong, ACTIVATES the legacy vehicles when it is OFF... my god, the mess all over the place ||), I discovered that the game is always using the legacy version of the Asian Carriage etc. with Lateral Stakes (Telega Stake), not the _v2 model file which is found in the vanilla game's zip files.
    My mod was trying to override the _v2 model file, but it ended up duplicating the vehicle instead. What I needed to override was the legacy telega_stake.mdl.



    Quote from Fabiano

    How do I get my horse coaches to replace and override the vanilla ones?

    The horse coaches i.e. the horse-drawn cars driven by the AI also suffer from legacy VS non-legacy issue, I think.
    By having both _v2 and non _v2 version of them, all coaches finally use my horse.



    One last puzzle

    Now there's one more problem I'm still missing before publishing the mod.


    The vehicles I override with the new horse don't respect the Europe/Asia/USA availability.
    No matter which continent I'm playing with, they are always available in the depot to buy. The years are respected, it's just the region that's wrong.


    I've found an answer in another thread which sounds correct to me:

    Quote from MaikC

    The vehicles are simply assigned to the regions via the folder in which they are located


    but my vehicles are already organised that way, they're copying the same folder structure of the game, and also their files are exact copies of the vanilla ones, except for the horse model, so I don't see how this problem can occur. Here's a fresh new game I just started:






    Any hint about this?

    Hello again, I completed a first version of this mod and it's now currently available on Steam:

    Better Draft Horses


    I solved

    Quote from Fabiano

    The vehicles I override with the new horse don't respect the Europe/Asia/USA availability

    by using a file filter function in runFn of the mod.lua that hides only horse drawn vehicles not belonging to the correct folder. = if playing with Asian vehicles, hides horse drawn models in the /usa/ folder and the upper (european) level. If playing with all vehicles, hides nothing apart from the double Telega Stake.



    So yeah I thought this was working but it wasn't.



    Please share any feedback if you're willing to try this mod ^^
    I'm open to suggestions on how to execute any of the mod's operations through a more efficient code.


    Nice to have in the future:


    • Better looking mane and tail.
    • Different kinds of harnesses (like in vanilla game).
    • Better looking harnesses.
    • Different hair colours, possibly randomized. If anybody knows how to do this, please let me know.
    • Nonaligned drive animation between various horses of the same vehicle, to make it look more natural.
    • Horses stop while the vehicle is not moving. If anybody knows how to do this, please let me know.

  • Flaconia

    Changed the title of the thread from “Help with my draft horses mod” to “Help with my Better Draft Horses mod”.
BlueBrixx