Manual Transmissions & Smooth First Gear
Requires game build 3095 or newer. You can enforce this on your server by adding sv_enforceGameBuild 3095 to your server.cfg.
Available in Mechanic v1.5 and newer. These settings won't appear or have any effect on electric vehicles.
Setup
This feature relies on some new-ish game functionality, via strAdvancedFlags in a vehicle's handling.meta. For everything to work as expected, this property at least needs to be present in the file.
Base Game Vehicles
Most base game vehicles already have it, but annoyingly, many don't. To fix this, you need to re-stream the handling.meta for all base game vehicles. Sounds complicated, but we made a resource for it - drag and drop it, then continue with this guide.
Addon Vehicles
If you're trying to get this to work with an addon vehicle, you'll unfortunately have to mess with some code. Head into the vehicle's files, and locate the handling.meta. Within there, you'll need to add:
<strAdvancedFlags>0</strAdvancedFlags>to the section CCarHandlingData. Just like this:
If the section <Item type="CCarHandlingData"> isn't present, you'll have to add it yourself.
Manual Transmission
You can now add a real manual transmission in the tablet's tuning parts menu. This is a special item that will change the vehicle's strAdvancedFlags to prevent automatic shifting and require the player to do it themselves. If you shift gears badly, the engine will take damage. The experience is fairly realistic, without being too difficult for the average player. The car won't move if you try to set off in 4th gear, for example.
To make it as easy as possible to use and actually desirable on your server, we detect if a vehicle has been stuck in a gear at high RPM for an extended time, and show a prompt with the key bindings to upshift/downshift.
This functionality is only available in game build 3095 or newer. To enforce a game build on your server, add sv_enforceGameBuild 3095 to your server.cfg.
See it in action here:
Changing Key Binds
This is done in-game. Hit ESC to go into the pause menu, then head to Settings > Key Binds > GTA Online Vehicles and adjust the "Shift Gear Up"/"Shift Gear Down" binds.
Smooth First Gear
This is a global config option that applies server-wide to all vehicles, including vehicles just spawned in/not owned. It will also update the vehicle's strAdvancedFlags to slow the RPM curve of the first gear to a much more realistic rate. This gives a console-type effect on keyboard, with reduced wheelspin and more time to upshift without being in the redline when using a manual transmission.
Enable it by setting:
Config.SmoothFirstGear = true