A patrol car that arrives instead of appearing

The first version of fleet control spawned a cruiser right next to the player: it simply materialised there. It worked, and everything about it was wrong. The car appeared instead of arriving. The game didn't consider it yours, so getting in counted as theft: the forced-entry animation, the stolen-vehicle prompt, and any NCPD officer nearby turning hostile at exactly the moment you least want that.

The game already has a summon: the one your own vehicles use. The car is placed somewhere out of sight, drives itself to you and pulls up at the kerb. Handing the job over meant giving up control of the arrival and getting everything else for free: the car is yours, there's no theft flag, no hostility, and it makes the same entrance as every other car in the game.

The catch is that a vehicle has to be on your list before you can call it. That took a TweakXL append to Vehicle.vehicle_list.list, one record per unit, so the police vehicles show up as summonable the same way a car you bought does. TweakXL is the tool that lets mods edit the game's database, and the key word is append: add to the list, never overwrite it. Overwriting stamps on every other mod that adds a vehicle, and that is the single most common way mod conflicts get made.

One casualty of the move. The old spawn path had a hack that switched the light bar and siren on the instant the car materialised, which worked because we owned the car from its very first frame. The summon hands the car over already parked, and that hook went with it. It needs redoing properly, tied to the moment the car arrives, rather than bolted back on.