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[Joriz]

I have just spent a couple of hours documenting the admin netcode for MTA:SA R1 as I have had a few requests for this from various people who wish to write their own admin programs.

I will probably be putting this on the wiki soon aswell, but for now you can get to it here.

I hope some people find this useful. Please note that this is likely to change in future releases as the admin system is undergoing a substantial rewrite. Also please note that I am not offering any support on how to write admin programs, this is only here as a guide for those who wish to use it.

Please let me know if there are any errors in this doc. I have proof read it but you never know </img>

Oli

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[Joriz]

We hope everyone is having fun with the map editor. As many of the community have pointed out, it is quite hard to get your maps onto a server so you can play them with other people. Server owners also need a way to find new and fun maps to put on their servers. While MTA:SA R1 was in development, a seperate web development team was hard at work creating a site designed for sharing maps. We've just released the site to the public, you can visit it here.

Thanks to our web development team Harry, DominionSpy and Xertoz for their work on the site, as well as the QA team for testing and breaking things. More is planned for this site, and the page will be updated periodically as new features are added.

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[Joriz]

As people may be aware, we switched our webserver software just after the MTA release, as our old webserver could not cope with the number of hits our site is getting. This has caused a few issues with the parts of MTA that interact with our webserver - the anti-cheat and the rss map downloader. This is because our new webserver seems less to follow a smaller subset of the HTTP protocol, either way, the end effect is that the anti-cheat definition files fail to download (see an older blog post for a manual solution for this) and the rss map downloader fails to actually do any downloading!

Anyway, we'll be releasing a new server soon to fix this issue with anti-cheat and a few other issues, but in the meantime, I've just quickly fixed the RSS map downloader. If you run a MTA server, you should download this fix. Currently it is only avaliable for Windows, we expect to release a linux version tomorrow (Wednesday).

You can download the Windows fix here.

We've had loads of maps submitted to our MTA center in the few hours its been up - if you run a server, go and download some, if you play them, go and comment and rate them!

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[Joriz]

The web development team has been working hard and has just added a new feature to the MTA Center. You can now see a map of any of the uploaded races, by clicking the "view" button on the race information page.

Heres an example:

Head over to the MTA Center at http://center.mtasa.com to check them out!

Many thanks to Ian Albert for giving us permision to use his map.

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[MTATeam (gast)]

We're announcing a new dedicated server release: MTA:SA R1.0 - Dedicated Server v1.03.

The new server will include the following fixes and new features:

- Race statistics on the end of races

- Updated mappack

- Updated configuration file

- Working anticheat update sequence on start

The new server should be available today.

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[MTATeam (gast)]

We did some work on footsync today and yesterday, and finally we did some testing within the team with 3 players today. We've created a new gamemode called 'deathmatch' for server and client with a pretty well designed framework. At the moment, it's not decided what kind of 'deathmatch' we will make officially, but it's very likely it will have support for our current map system built on what we've learned from "race" before and after release.

Here are some screenshots from our initial test:

</img> </img> </img>

What's synced? At the moment all animations work pretty well (including walking, running, crouching, climbing, punching ... ), though they aren't explicitly synced yet, means there's no 100% guarantee it looks exactly the same at both sides. Improving this, and weapon sync is something we will work from now on, so watch this space!

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[MTATeam (gast)]

We've been doing some more work on deathmatch over the last couple of days and now have shooting synchronization working nicely. For people who have played MTA 0.5, the accuracy is spot on, at least in our very small tests. We've also got maps loading in deathmatch, like they do in the race mod so we had some fun running around destruction derby shooting the barrels! There's still some areas we want to work on with shooting, and we've also got to implement vehicles.

Anyway, we've made good progress. We'll try to post some screenshots soon to show you how things look so far.

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[MTATeam (gast)]

Planet Grand Theft Auto.com interviewed us yesterday and have posted the interview on their website. In it we discuss various things about the past and the future of MTA.

Click here to read the interview!

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[MTATeam (gast)]

We've been working hard on deathmatch over the last couple of days. I personally have been working on various client side code, relating to getting in and out of vehicles, while ChrML has been working on spawning vehicles around the map so that they're ready for you to get into them! Oli meanwhile has been working on some clever stuff in the server that we'll reveal later on, when its finished. Not much to show screenshot-wise yet, we're just getting all the pieces ready - when we put them together we hope we'll have another fun 'blue' mod!

We are very open to your suggestions for DM at this stage, please don't hesitate to use our forum to tell us how you think we should do it. Now is the time to offer suggestions, not after we've started beta testing </img>

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[MTATeam (gast)]

Deathmatch will have maps, just like the "race" release has at the moment, though it's improved in several ways. This time when you die, you don't have to wait until everyone has died and a new map is started until you respawn. Respawn times and respawn modes are all specifyable in the map file (the current modes are 'none', 'timelimit' and 'waves').

None is for 'Last Man Standing' maps where you ideally play in a small map with weapons and see who lives in the end.

With timelimit, you can specify how many seconds the server shall wait from the time a player has died till he respawns. Pretty ideal for freeroaming maps in big areas.

With waves, the server tries to respawn players in "waves", meaning dead players are respawned at for example 30 second intervals (the time is specifyable in the map files). This means you can die, and be lucky enough to respawn 1 second later, or you may have to wait another 20 or 30 seconds. This should work pretty well for deathmatches in smaller areas, or in team matches if we decide to implement this in the first deathmatch release.

At the moment, there is no "Click to join", though I will implement this some time later. It's nice when you can stay in spectator and watch the other players if you wish. Note that spectator for deathmatch isn't coded yet. Some of the code is portable from race, though it needs some tweaking to be able to spectate on foot too. Should be pretty trivial.

I've also been working on vehicle spawning. These are places drivable vehicles are spawned by the server in your map. Vehicle spawns are currently definable in the map files using the vehiclespawnpoint tag (or the deathmatch editor when it's done). You're able to have quite a lot of vehicle spawns in your map, theoretically up to 65534 though this hasn't been tested yet, meaning you can put vehicle spawnpoints all over San Andreas if you want. Same as you can do with player spawnpoints.

GTA itself is only able to handle about 110 vehicles at the same time, so I've used the same streamer I've coded to deal with the checkpoint limit and the object limit to deal with the vehicles. The streaming is fast and doesn't add any noticable decrease in FPS.

What I'm going to do the comming days is server/netcode for getting in/out of vehicles and vehicle state management serverside (driver, passengers, position, health, landing gear states, turret states etc...). eAi has been doing the game part.

Remember to watch this space for updates the comming days! </img>

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[MTATeam (gast)]

Just a small update on our Deathmatch progress.

I was away Friday evening to Saturday evening (LAN party with some friends </img>), but when I came back, I did some vehicle entering/exiting code and I ported the vehicle sync from 'Race'. Currently it allows you to enter any vehicle placed in the map file using the vehiclespawnpoint tag, drive them around and exit them. Car jacking is also supported. The sync looks very nice, and unlike MTA 0.5, the animations for entering, exiting and jacking cars are also synced. There's a small bug with the jacking at the moment, but eAi/I expect fixing it tommorrow as well as doing some passenger/passenger jacking code.

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[MTATeam (gast)]

I did some passenger client/net code yesterday and today and it's now working pretty well with the vehicles we've tried. Currently I mapped the Y button for entering as a passenger, though this key is most likely changed before release, or maybe it'll become bindable (user defined). Most vehicles can have 1 passenger, though a lot can also have 3 and some (busses) can have up to 8 passengers. I'm not sure if we'll increase the bus passenger limit before release, but it's pretty trivial to do if we want to.

As always, all animations are synced, and vehicles with passengers can get their driver jacked. It's tested to be pretty reliable (played with eAi on 500 ping, my desktop and my laptop), and it's designed in a way making it hard/impossible to desync, and if it does, the desyncing players are disconnected with a code tracable for us (should never happen in the released version). There are still a few things to fix and tweak on, for example if you abort jacking a vehicle, though I'd say the vehicle occupant, jacking and passenger code is almost done.

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[MTATeam (gast)]

Today, the 8th of February is Multi Theft Auto's 3rd birthday. As people who have followed MTA since the beginning will know, we've come a long, long way. Not many game modifications survive this long, although, like all mods we've had our fair share of ups and downs, we've certainly all learnt a lot from MTA.

As much as we'd like to celebrate today - go out and get drunk and wonder why we wasted the last 3 years of our spare time - we've been busy working hard on deathmatch, which we plan to be a solid base for our future mods. This is why it may seem like we spend a long time on things that would appear to be very easy, and miss out the things everyone wants to see - we want to try to get it right first time.

Our 'core' technology, 'Blue' itself has been in development for almost 2 and a half years. In this time we were pretty ruthless with our code, in fact almost every part of blue was rewritten at least 3 times - from scratch in most cases. This is why it took us forever to get our first release out! This has certainly made blue something entirely different to what it would have been if we'd continued developing our first attempt.

The whole development team would like to thank all our players who have played Multi Theft Auto for making our work worthwhile and fulfilling. In the two and a half weeks since we release Multi Theft Auto: San Andreas R1, it has been downloaded over 850000 times, we've quite frequently had over a 1000 players playing MTA at once and we've got over a thousand maps on the MTA Center! Please spread the word, tell your friends, lets make this Multi Theft Auto's best year yet!

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[MTATeam (gast)]

Today I did some code for pickups in the deathmatch map files. These pickups can be weapons, health or armor pickups and they appear exactly like they do in singleplayer. Weapon pickups can be any weapon existing in GTA such as a pistol, a rocket launcher or a chainsaw. The weapon, along with ammo and respawn intervals are definable in the map files, allowing you to create very customized deathmatch maps. I tested this briefly and it appears to work </img>. Health and Armor pickups aren't done clientside yet, but I expect this to be done tommorrow.

Also Oli has also been working hard on some serverside stuff we're going to reveal later on </img>. Watch this space!

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[MTATeam (gast)]

We began doing a little work on Race Mod 1.1 yesterday. I did dynamic respawning which is definable using the tags 'respawn' and 'respawntime' in the map file. The possible values are 'none' (for last man standing maps), 'timelimit' (for example respawn after 10 seconds) and 'waves' where players respawn in wave intervals at for example 30 seconds. The timelimit time or the wave intervals are definable using the 'respawntime' tag. If no 'respawn' tag is specified, it defaults to 'timelimit' on 30 seconds so old maps such as Destruction Derby and Freeroam will do respawning without any map update required.

The respawn position is the last hit checkpoint, or if none, one of the spawnpoints are chosen. I wouldn't recommend the respawn type "waves" for races as some players will have to wait longer than other players. I might also code some "Click to respawn" feature.

In 1.1, you can also specify a map duration. Maps with dynamic respawning won't end when all players are dead, because they'll respawn, though they will end after the time specified in the 'duration' tag. The value is specified in seconds (ie 300 seconds for 5 minutes), and can be 0 for infinite. As lots of server owners download maps from external sources such as our Community Center, there's also an upper limit you can define in the server config. It can also be 0 for infinite. If any maps exceed the limit specified in the server config, it will be limited to that value. For example if you specify 10 minutes in a map, but the server has 5 minutes specified in the server config, the limit used will be adjusted to 5 minutes. The time left on a map is displayed on all client screens.

Also, in version 1.1, the animations on remote players when they lean on bikes and pedalling works unlike the current release.

Please note that the release date is unpredictable, so please don't ask! </img>

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