ymap or script: how a custom FiveM sign is built

#Two ways to animate a sign

A script sign spawns objects and changes them from client Lua. Usually that means a loop that recolours a material, swaps a texture variation or moves a prop a little each frame. It is quick to write and easy to break: it costs frame time, it stops when the resource stops, and every player sees a slightly different phase because every client started its own timer at a different moment.

A map sign puts the animation inside the asset. The colour cycle lives in a texture, and a clip dictionary scrolls the UV coordinates across it. That is not a trick — it is exactly the mechanism the base game uses for its own moving signage and screens. Once the asset is streamed, the engine animates it with no help from anybody.

#What the baked version actually contains

The colour ramp is rendered to a narrow strip texture — one pixel column per step of the loop. The drawable's UVs are laid out so that each letter, or each slice of a logo, reads from a particular point along that strip.

The clip dictionary then animates the UV offset over the length of the loop. Scrolling the strip past the geometry is what makes the colours travel across the sign. Because the loop is a property of the clip and not of a timer, two clients who joined an hour apart are looking at the same frame of it.

• A .ytd holding the colour strip for the loop.
• A .ycd clip dictionary that scrolls the UV offset, named so the engine binds it to the drawable automatically.
• Drawables whose shader is set up for animated UVs and emissive output.
• Archetype flags that tell the game the model carries its own animation.

#What a baked sign cannot do

It cannot react. If you want the sign to change colour when a gang takes a turf, or spell out the name of the last player who joined, you need a script — the asset has no way to know about any of that.

Everything that is purely visual, though, belongs in the map. A loop, a sweep, a breathing glow, a gradient travelling across the letters: all of that is decided when the asset is built, and after that it is the engine's problem rather than yours.

#Why we only export maps

The banner creator has no script export, on purpose. A script version would be easier for us to generate and worse for you to run — and the day someone restarts the wrong resource, the sign your server is named after goes dark.

It also makes the resource portable in a way a script never is. Hand the folder to another admin, drop it on a fresh server, move hosts: nothing has to be matched up, because there is nothing to match.