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[MTATeam (gast)]

As you know, and as we've noticed, the voting system in the first release of Race was pretty bad. As everyone can call a vote for a new map any time and it instantly changes, a lot of people abuse it on servers with a lot of players and votes are being initiated like every 5 second.

In Race 1.1 we've been working on fixing that. In Race 1.1, it's possible to disable instant map changes overall and only use map nominations at the end of a map. As all maps got dynamic respawning (unless they specify not to) and a map timelimit can be enforced in the server config, all maps will end sooner or later and hopefully all players can play it the entire time due to the respawning. At the end of a map, the server will call a vote with some randomly picked maps and "Play last map again". The number of randomly picked maps can be specified in the server config and can be from 2 to 8. When that vote ends (everyone has voted or the 10 second timer ends), it will pick the two most voted maps (ie "Destruction Derby" and "Play last map again"), then call a new vote with only those two maps in it. This has been done in other games and appears to work very nicely. The random maps chosen are in a maplist that will rotate when all maps have been in a vote, ensuring that some maps doesn't appear in a vote a lot more often than other maps.

The new voting system is about halfway done. Requires some testing and shortcuts like if only one/two maps were voted on in the first vote, skip the second one, and maybe a realtime vote count next to the alternatives.

Have a nice day </img>.

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[MTATeam (gast)]

MTA: Race 1.1 Beta 1 got released to our QA team yesterday. It had a few weird bugs with the "respawning on last checkpoint" feature, but those were fixed today. The voting nomination also has a bug I need to fix. Other than that it seems to work well, meaning you can expect a new release of Race pretty soon </img>.

Things are also progressing pretty well on the Deathmatch front. You can expect some amazing news from there soon too </img>.

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[MTATeam (gast)]

As you may know, R1.1 went to our QA team about a week ago and since then I've been trying to release daily betas. I've been visiting my family from Thursday to Sunday though, so unfortunately I couldn't get anything done during that period.

We've had a few issues with respawning and race ranking but now I've sorted all of them apart from the "restore landing gear and hover state on respawn" one. That's probably going to get fixed by release, but I can't promise anything.

I expect Release Candidate 1 being released tommorrow to the QA team with installers and documents all set up, though it might take an additional day depending on how things turn out.

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[MTATeam (gast)]

Hi everyone...

You've not heard from me for some time as I've been somewhat busy with some Real Life things and as soon as I had some time to spare, my hard disk with all my MTA stuff on decided to die on me. Then the company that sent me my replacement hard disk decided to send me the wrong one... Anyway, I've finally got mostly up and running again, and I hope to be doing blog posts more often!

Race 1.1 is looking good, we've just got a few issues left to fix and we want to do some more work on the anti-cheat system (which I'm sure most of our players will be pleased about), but its almost done. We actually think that the anti-cheat has worked pretty well so far in Race 1.0, so it can only get better!

I've done some work today on deathmatch that I can't really discuss right yet, but deathmatch is looking pretty good. Once we've got race 1.1 out the door we'll be able to concentrate on deathmatch much more and hopefully have some media to show you soon.

Anyway, not much to say - watch this space for more information as to how race 1.1 is coming on </img>

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[MTATeam (gast)]

Well, been a while since my last update as i've been working a lot on deathmatch and my PC died a couple of weeks ago so it's taken me a while to get everything back up and running normally again </img>

However, I am now back on the ball and have spent some time working on the Admin system for the next Race Mod release. I've decided to include a few new features that various people have requested and made some tweaks here and there.

First of all I'll list some of the new features (this isn't final yet and there will likely be a couple more things added before release):

- Admin's can now send PM's to players (these are also sent to all other admins). You can also just PM directly to the console ingame, without having to display things in the chat.

- Ping's are now sent to Admin, so it will be possible to make a ping kicking script using MTA:mA.

- Notification is now sent when players finish races (I will most likely also be sending when players respawn and when a race "ends" aswell, but this has not been done yet).

- There are a few more rcon commands for ingame admins, mainly to match what the Remote Admin features (ie: rcon unban).

These are just a few of the things I have done to the admin system, there have been a few small tweaks here and there too (ie /me is now supported from admin and console) and I have fixed a few crashes in the Remote Admin client. Do also note that due to the 255 map limit on the server being removed in v1.1, the admin netcode has drastically changed for races, and there have been a few other changes around the netcode. I will release a new version of the netcode documentation on the wiki when v1.1 is out.

That's all i've got to say for now I think as it's around 4am and i need my sleep </img>

Oli

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[MTATeam (gast)]

Those of you who have not yet download Race 1.1 can now download it from our download page at light.mtavc.com.

We strongly encourage you to please login to report errors using the included error reporter that should prompt you for a password during the install. This password is your MTA Center password, and the bug reports we've received so far have been extremely useful.

As mentioned before, some people have had an issue where nothing happens after the inital 'splash screen' appears. We have released a fix for this you can download here. Note: If you are having this issue please can you contact me (eAi) on the forums or IRC as I would like to try another fix out that may be better.

As mentioned before the crash reports we've recieved so far have been helpful, we've fixed one crash that was causing a large percentage of crashes and there are other crashes we are looking into. We do need as many error reports as we can get though, so please login or register - it really helps!

Note: There is a bug that if you try to log into the error reporter during the install and it is a clean install (i.e. you haven't installed MTA:SA before or you uninstalled the old version) it will not work. To fix this, either install twice, ignoring the login the first time, or run the 'MTA Center Login.exe' in your MTA install directory after you installed.

We hope everyone has fun!

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[MTATeam (gast)]

We've had a few reports of freezes that occur a lot for some people, but not at all for most people. These didn't appear during our beta tests. We're currently testing a patch for these that we are fairly sure works perfectly. We plan to release a client patch sometime soon which will include this fix.

If you have this issue, please contact me on IRC and I'll send you the patch to test out.

We're sorry for the problems this has caused people!

Ed

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[MTATeam (gast)]

Just thought I'd post a quick reminder to server administrators: The anti-cheat only updates when you start your server. Currently, this means we recommend that if you have anti-cheat enabled, you restart your server from time to time (say once every 24 hours) to make sure you have the latest detection file. Obviously, this is optional, but we do release updates every now and then that detect new cheats, so being up-to-date is generally a good idea!

We do intend to make it so that updates can be downloaded automatically without restarting the server at some point, but for now, restarting is the only way.

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[MTATeam (gast)]

We're interested in having some feedback on what you think the MTA Center (http://center.mtasa.com) is missing - how it could change and any suggestions you have generally for it. We want to make the center a hub for all sorts of things that our community would like. Please add a comment with any reasonable suggestions you have!

In other news we're now mainly working on Deathmatch again, while I personally am doing some work on some things that need to be added to Race for a future release. We'll have a more interesting update here soon!

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[MTATeam (gast)]

We have added a new login system to the blog. From now on you need to login to post a comment. The login system is linked to our community center.

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[MTATeam (gast)]

For the past weeks I have slowly been working on a ladder system to expand our site.

The ladder will be working next to the map system. They will share the same user accounts and side menu. It will only have some basic functionality in the beginning but improvements will follow. There is also some work in progress on the rules for the first ladder. The ladders themselves use the elo rating system as it is used in many online gaming ladders.

In the future we hope to add other competitions as well like knock-out competitions and leagues.

click image for more

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[MTATeam (gast)]

Not much to update people on at the moment, hence the relative infrequency of the blog posts recently.

We're all working hard on Deathmatch and all the pieces are finally coming together now. Once we've got all the features in that we want - we're almost there - we'll be following the same process we did with Race 1.0, using our Quality Assurance team to test the mod thoroughly. We hope that this testing stage will be shorter than Race 1.0's (which took almost 3 months!), but its hard to tell at this stage. Many of the issues we fixed for Race would have affected Deathmatch too, so this should be easier.

We've still got a few interesting features for Deathmatch up our collective sleeves, so watch this space for the first information on these over the next few weeks!

Ed

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[MTATeam (gast)]

Today the third alpha version of MTA:SA Deathmatch was released to our Quality Assurance team. So far the response has been positive and it works very well, a lot more than we expected.

Here are some screenshots we captured today:

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

Our QA team is also working on a video that will show some of the work we've done so far, though it will still keep some things secret for later on.

Have fun </img>.

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[MTATeam (gast)]

I went away on Tuesday visiting someone in my family with cancer </img>, and came back today. Before I went away, I wrote a spectator system for Deathmatch that seems to work pretty well. Changing spectated player works like in Race, using Left and Right arrow.

Also, Kent and I worked on some lag compensation code for shooting which also seems to work. Kent told me he was able to hit Oli running perpendicular to him with a Rifle with a decent ping, and aiming AT him (not infront of him). Shooting might still need some tweaks to work optimally but we're really happy with how it looks, and hell it's accurate. Ping compensation for shooting basically means you can hit moving players pretty accurately by aiming at them rather than trying to predict their future path to hit them. Walking and running is also very smooth. As far as I can tell, it's very close to Singleplayer smooth, also when running. Vehicle smoothness is also improved significantly from Race 1.1.1.

Have a nice day! </img>

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[MTATeam (gast)]

Today I added something small to the main site. It now shows a picture from our latest tests. We are going to update this picture on a regular basis. How often will depend on the number of pictures our QA team takes </img> .

I am also working on a new forum theme that is styled after the general site design.

On another note, the ladder system will have to wait until a next MTA release since the rules and fair play require some small changes to MTA. This also gives me the time to expand on its functionality.

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