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[MTATeam (gast)]

We've have been working on MTA:SA's GUI (Graphical User Interface) and that resulted in some (major) changes in the appearance of MTA:SA in general.

The original R1.1 proportions of the GUI, which are called "relative sizes", were not really ideal: the native GUI was 800x600 and all the widgets and fonts were just blown up if someone was using a higher resolution than the native one. I'm sure you're fimiliar with it. Let me show you an example.

By using absolute sizes in pixels (e.g. 400x300 pixels instead of 0.5x0.5 relative) we can maintain our originally designed sizes for fonts and widgets. No more blown up title bars, labels, too big fonts, etc. This results in a much neater look, the way the skin was meant to be. At last!

This is more than just a cosmetic change though. As a result.. you can now resize the console window to whatever size you want, the chatbox will be able to show more text, etc. etc.

Oh and there's a lot more to come, so stay tuned.

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[MTATeam (gast)]

We realise there haven't been many updates recently so I thought I'd just make it clear what the situation is.

No, the mod is not dead. It's been quieter than usual during the past fews months due to people leaving for summer activities.. Even so, there has been good progress - Oli has improved upon the radar mod plus some other features which he'll be posting about soon.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to clarify what stage we are in development since people have been asking us if certain features exist when they are very basic by our standards so we didn't announce them.

* More animations are synced unlike MTA 0.5. This eliminates many abilities to glitch within the game. An infamous one was the enter/exit car animation, this is now synced.

* Drivebys and passenger drivebys are possible, both utilising free aim.

* Vehicles are synced even when nobody is inside the car. For example, if you are at a high speed and jump out of a car, the car will continue to move on everyone's screen.

* Vehicles remain in the position they are when someone leaves the server. In previous MTA's, when someone disconnects, the last car he was in would return to its position. In MTASA DM however, if you park a car and damage it, upon returning to the server you will find a damaged car where you left it.

* Sync has been significantly improved. Players of race will notice huge improvements in smoothness and reduced impact of latency. Also, players with lower end connections will find Deathmatch much more playable.

* Players are now streamed out when far away. This allows for improved sync and reduces bandwidth further to make the sync more efficient.

* The map editor will be vastly improved for Deathmatch to suit its style of gameplay.

* All weapons are synced. You may have seen from past videos that snipers have been synced. This extends to rocket launchers and satchel charges.

* Vehicle weapons are still functional. Tanks, hydras, hunters, fire trucks all have functioning weapons.

* MTA will have access to a lot more of GTA's settings, many of which can be configured ingame.

* Nametags are vastly improved. Firstly, they are generally smaller to suit the on-foot nature of DM. They now have clipping - you wont see nametags behind ingame objects. They are also draw according to distance, so big nametags will not display when someone is far away. Finally, they display armour with borders around the nametag.

There have also been bugs which have been fixed. Trailers did not used to attach properly, and some keybinds issues that have been fixed. Satchel charges still have issues with identifying the owner of the charge which is yet to be resolved. These small issues are ones that must be resolved to improve the quality of the mod.

I hope this gives you an idea as to what stage the team are in, in terms of development. We are very close to beta stages, and iit is unlikely that any features will need to be implemented during the beta stages. Beta will almost definately be feature complete and the team can focus on bug fixing which should take significantly less time than implementing new features. We'll have a more development related blog post soon.

- Talidan

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[MTATeam (gast)]

Yesterday I spent some time working on the frontend of our new keybinds system, which was written before as a replacement for GTA's keybinds system.

The advantage of having our own keybinds system is that we can allow a bind from any key to any control, including the controls we (or our users) add for our own functionality, such as the "Enter as Passenger", "Radar ...", etc. keys you can see below.

The frontend now includes a keybinds list in our Settings window, that will allow you to bind a key on your keyboard to a control you select.

Here's what I'm talking about.

In the meanwhile, we have, of course, also been working on various other things we will tell you about soon.. and the usual stuff under the hood </img>

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[MTATeam (gast)]

Well, the last few weeks I've been very busy in real life, however, I have been working on a new scoreboard system. Its not totally complete quite yet, but hopefully it should be in a few days. This new system has support for teams and supports more players that will fit on the screen. Here is a basic overview of its features:

- Support for infinite teams

- Support for more players

- Team colours are shown on the scoreboard (as the background colour for the speecific team section)

Basically, the scoreboard will display all the teams, and the players who are not in a team. If there are too many teams to fit on the screen, then you can scroll down the teams. In each team section there are players with their details, if there are too many players for a team section, then you can also scroll the players in the team sections. This works by basically "selecting" a team section, and then you can scroll it.

I havn't managed to get a screenshot of this with lots of teams and players yet, but i'll show you one with just me in the server and you'll get the idea:

This is still a work in progress mind you, but it should be completed in the coming days.

On another note, I have now added some more functionality to the radar system. You can now zoom in/out, move around the radar, and attach it to your local player, so you are always in the centre of the radar map. These all have controls which are keybinds, and you can customise them in the key control options box.

MrJax has been a busy boy too, he has just done some work on players clothes, so now players can have different clothes. He and eAi have also added support for jetpacks, which is a nice fun feature </img>

Player streaming has been overhauled and now is far more effective. Players are now streamed out when a far way away, which allows us to support more players in the server.

The global accounts system has also been rewritten, so now it uses the XML system in the server, and player registering is also possible. This has some other benefits which I won't go into at this time, but you'll find out soon enough </img>

Thats about all I have to update you on tonight, stay tuned for some more exciting info coming soon!

Oli

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[MTATeam (gast)]

As many eagle-eyed fans noticed from some recent pictures in the Picture Gallery, customisable synced license plates are now possible, and map creators can change player stats to suit the gameplay of the map. This allows for many possibilities such as fat CJ's, dual weapon wielding and faster movement, for example.

Also, MTA can now load interiors when a player goes into a building. The map creator can choose whether or not to allow players to see each other, allowing you to create a "safe house" if you wish.

The team has very few features left to implement before going into beta, although some of these will take longer than others. It's impossible to give a timeframe, but rest assured that we are close.

The beta will be an invitation-only affair, with invitees chosen at the discretion of the MTA and QA teams. Please do not ask to be included, and do not be offended if you are not chosen.

The bugs found in the beta will be fixed by the team. When they feel happy with the quality of the mod, they will release a Release Candidate to the QA team. We will then test this and if it has no noticeable bugs, it will be released publicly. If not, the team will fix the bugs and release another RC and the process will begin again.

We cannot give a timeframe for these events as we simply do not know. You'll be glad to know that the extensive testing of Race helped a lot in reducing the bugs in the Blue core but we do not know how many we will find when we start testing with more players.

-- QA Team

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[MTATeam (gast)]

It's been a while since my last blog post, so I thought I share some news with you. </img>

We have recently changed the way our testing system works - from a well-known and used strict alpha schedule, to a nightly build system. This means that we'll be receiving a new alpha build every night at a certain hour, updated with the changes made on the previous day.

This greatly improves our testing efficency, since now we can check the newly-added features or bugfixes soon after they're done, instead of waiting several days for a new release. You can find some traces of it on the recently published screenshots at our gallery.

Also, in the last blog post Jon introduced the interiors being implemented into MTA. He also mentioned that the map creator can set it to allow, or disallow players from seeing each other in the interior.

That specific behaviour is possible via the new feature, called 'Dimension'.

To explain it better, dimensions are a way of separating parts of the game world from each other. Each dimension can contain any element, and elements are only visible to players in the same dimension as they are.

For example, there is only one actual Pizza restaurant in San Andreas, with each warp point going to the same place. This works fine in single player games (as you aren't going to be in two places at once), but with multiplayer this can be confusing, as you could enter in one place and see all the players who entered in another. To avoid this, map creator can split the players into dimensions, so they will only see players who entered in the same place.

That's all for today, stay tuned for more updates </img>

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[MTATeam (gast)]

The team have been hard at work fixing bugs lately and there isn't any interesting information to give you, so I thought I'd reveal a feature that was implemented a while ago.

MTA:SA Deathmatch now supports the in-game car mods such as exhausts, spoilers, nitrous, hydraulics, etc. (third party mods are still unsupported). You can set these attributes upon spawning the car or allow players to upgrade their vehicles mid-game. With license plate customisation and the ability to change the colour as well, players can really make vehicles their own, which offers interesting possibilities for RPG.

Picture by BrophY

We'll keep you updated as the mod progresses.

Note: The team are looking for another developer to speed things along. If you're a competent C++ programmer with a keen interest in GTA and some time to spare, contact eAi at eAi [at] opencoding [dot] net.

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[MTATeam (gast)]

The team have been hard at work fixing bugs lately and there isn't any interesting information to give you, so I thought I'd reveal a feature that was implemented a while ago.

MTA:SA Deathmatch now supports the in-game car mods such as exhausts, spoilers, nitrous, hydraulics, etc. (third party mods are still unsupported). You can set these attributes upon spawning the car or allow players to upgrade their vehicles mid-game. With license plate customisation and the ability to change the colour as well, players can really make vehicles their own, which offers interesting possibilities for RPG.

We'll keep you updated as the mod progresses.

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[MTATeam (gast)]

Hi everyone,

I thought I'd just write a quick update so that you know what we're up to and answer a number of questions.

The first question on everyone's mind is:

Why the hell is it taking so long?

The answer is a number of things:

- Firstly, a few team members have had other things more important to do in Real Life. Its a sad fact of this kind of mod development that people come and go often with little warning. This has had quite a big impact on the development, but we've brought in some new people over the last few months and hopefully this will help things along faster.

- Secondly, we have, in a way, bitten off more than we expected with this release. We could have done a quick and dirty release, but we decided (perhaps mistakenly) to go full out on our first release. With a more active team this was reasonable, but with hindsight, perhaps a Bad Thing. Either way, we're here now and we're doing our best to get things out.

- Thirdly, we've encountered a couple of major bugs that affect shooting, these are hard to solve, although certainly possible - we've not put a huge amount of time into looking for fixes yet, but they're annoying.

What are we doing now then?

Well, we've pretty much finished DM apart from a number of known issues. We're now working on making the editor for DM.

Why not release without an editor?

Part of what made MTA:Race so popular was the editor, and we feel that it'd be very hard to make even a beta release without some form of an editor. We've discussed this in team and with our QA team and we've agreed that we need an editor of some form. As such we are making an editor as fast as we can as I write this. Obviously, we can't give any estimates for when this will be done, but be sure it will be as fast as is possible.

What about doing public beta before with the major bugs in?

We're unsure about this. We've always tried to get rid of any know bugs in our releases and we feel major bugs (e.g. some weapons not working correctly) should be removed before we make any form of release. Even though we call every release a beta release, we still get much criticism about bugs that exist in the releases. We're open to your views on this, of course - would you mind playing a beta version that had a number of major bugs? We want to get this out ASAP too!

How will we release?

We intend to do a limited public beta of some sort as soon as the editor has been through some basic alpha testing in the QA team. Please do not ask to join our testing team or the public beta - we'll post here if we're looking for testers.

How about cutting some features/corners?

Well, we've cut quite a number of fairly minor features that would have taken a long time to implement already, and can't really cut any more. We've got a very close eye on "feature creep" to make sure no time is spent on new features. As to cutting corners, we'd rather not. Every time we cut a corner we'll have to come back to it later and hence delay any future versions. This release has been designed from the ground up with extendability in mind, so, hopefully future releases will be considerably closer together (I know we've said this before).

We are very sorry that it is taking us so long to get this release out, we've put years of work into MTA so the extended development time annoys us as much as it does the community.

Finally, we do still have a number of features to show off - so watch this space!

We'd like to thank everyone for their support and patience.

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[MTATeam (gast)]

Hi everyone,

I thought I'd just write a quick update so that you know what we're up to and answer a number of questions.

The first question on everyone's mind is:

Why the hell is it taking so long?

The answer is a number of things:

- Firstly, a few team members have had other things more important to do in Real Life. Its a sad fact of this kind of mod development that people come and go often with little warning. This has had quite a big impact on the development, but we've brought in some new people over the last few months and hopefully this will help things along faster.

- Secondly, we have, in a way, bitten off more than we expected with this release. We could have done a quick and dirty release, but we decided (perhaps mistakenly) to go full out on our first release. With a more active team this was reasonable, but with hindsight, perhaps a Bad Thing. Either way, we're here now and we're doing our best to get things out.

- Thirdly, we've encountered a couple of major bugs that affect shooting, these are hard to solve, although certainly possible - we've not put a huge amount of time into looking for fixes yet, but they're annoying.

What are we doing now then?

Well, we've pretty much finished DM apart from a number of known issues. We're now working on making the editor for DM.

Why not release without an editor?

Part of what made MTA:Race so popular was the editor, and we feel that it'd be very hard to make even a beta release without some form of an editor. We've discussed this in team and with our QA team and we've agreed that we need an editor of some form. As such we are making an editor as fast as we can as I write this. Obviously, we can't give any estimates for when this will be done, but be sure it will be as fast as is possible.

What about doing public beta before with the major bugs in?

We're unsure about this. We've always tried to get rid of any know bugs in our releases and we feel major bugs (e.g. some weapons not working correctly) should be removed before we make any form of release. Even though we call every release a beta release, we still get much criticism about bugs that exist in the releases. We're open to your views on this, of course - would you mind playing a beta version that had a number of major bugs? We want to get this out ASAP too!

How will we release?

We intend to do a limited public beta of some sort as soon as the editor has been through some basic alpha testing in the QA team. Please do not ask to join our testing team or the public beta - we'll post here if we're looking for testers.

How about cutting some features/corners?

Well, we've cut quite a number of fairly minor features that would have taken a long time to implement already, and can't really cut any more. We've got a very close eye on "feature creep" to make sure no time is spent on new features. As to cutting corners, we'd rather not. Every time we cut a corner we'll have to come back to it later and hence delay any future versions. This release has been designed from the ground up with extendability in mind, so, hopefully future releases will be considerably closer together (I know we've said this before).

We are very sorry that it is taking us so long to get this release out, we've put years of work into MTA so the extended development time annoys us as much as it does the community.

Finally, we do still have a number of features to show off - so watch this space!

We'd like to thank everyone for their support and patience.

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[MTATeam (gast)]

Hey all,

Just thought I'd post a quick note to say that things are picking up in the team a bit and we're making some good progress. We've changed how we're going to do the editor (not that you knew how we were planning to do it before, thats for another time!) hopefully making the process simpler and also reducing the amount of code we have to write thats specified to the editor. The side effect of this will be that we'll produce a couple of new features at the same time that'll be good fun in deathmatch.

Not got much else to say yet - we'll have some big news fairly soon, once we've got the editor into beta I reckon. Until then, have a browse through the image gallery if you haven't already - the QA team put new images on frequently.

Ed

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[MTATeam (gast)]

Well, its really quite busy at the moment here, we're still working hard on the editor too! We had a quiet period a for a couple of weeks, but over the last few days we've really got a load of good work done. As anyone who has worked on a mod will know, people's spare time (and motivation) can change a lot, without warning, so its really great when everyone is around and doing something.

Sadly, we're not going to make a Christmas release, the editor is taking a bit longer than expected (what doesn't!), but the outcome is a new feature that has a huge amount of potential, so I think its worth it.

The QA team have been working hard on some stuff to give you all as a Christmas present. You'll find out about a whole raft of features we've not yet announced or shown off. Hopefully it'll be done by Christmas day - watch this space!

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[MTATeam (gast)]

Well, we promised you all a Christmas present and we haven't let you down. It's been almost a year since Race was released, so you're probably wondering what we've been doing for all this time. I can assure you that we have not been idle. Customised license plates have been introduced, and the GUI is now semi-transparent. For the past couple of months, we have been working on this card to show you guys.

We think you'll be very impressed with what the card shows, and it really does indicate the direction that the MTA team have been taking the mod. We're very excited about it and you should be too.

</img>

We'd like to take this opportunity to wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

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[MTATeam (gast)]

As many of you know, we released a video two days ago showcasing many new features in MTA. If you missed it, here it is:

Everything you saw in that video was created using MTA's new scripting system. This is the secret feature we alluded to many months ago. It was actually started before MTA:Race, which gives you an idea of how long we have been working on this. This is not the SDK; the SDK is more powerful but scripting still offers a great deal of flexibility. To put things in perspective, we currently have 373 functions available for developers to use for pretty much anything. The video only showed a few of them, such as object movement, hit detection and camera modification.

All MTA scripts are written in the Lua scripting language. We chose Lua for several reasons, including its simple syntax, extensibility and the fact that Lua scripts do not need to be pre-compiled. Those of you with experience in other languages should pick things up pretty quickly, but I stress that scripting is not necessary in order to make a map. Existing game mode scripts can be imported into new maps with no scripting necessary (more on this at a later date). However, for those of you that do want to code game modes, the QA team has been working hard on providing extensive documentation to aid in this process.

Whilst the video mainly showed tech demos and mini games, the QA team has been working hard on several game modes. Capture the Flag was shown in the video but other modes such as Conquest and Turf Wars are in development. It will be particularly interesting to see what the RPG community will do with the power of the new scripting system. Features useful to RPG programmers include control over time and weather, customisable player stats and clothes, integration with the MTA Center for player authentication (optional), vehicle modifications, 3D sound functions, dimensions, and many more.

One thing from the video that I feel should be explained is the shot where players are moving buildings around with the mouse. This is not the map editor; it is just a demo script. The map editor is still in development, but we will be using the scripting language to create it. If you think back to the map editor in Race, you will appreciate just how powerful the scripting language is to be able to recreate and improve upon it.

Another important feature in the video is glue, which will play a crucial role in the creation of the map editor. Glue is used to attach two objects together so that they move and rotate in unison. This allows players to "stick" to vehicles in order to fire from them without falling off. Gluing is enabled by the scripter and can be triggered any way he chooses - whether by a hotkey, a menu option or standing close to the vehicle for a certain amount of time. We really want to emphasise the flexibility and number of choices given to scripters when creating game modes for MTA:SA.

We will start a new feature on the blog where we show you short videos of scripts and tech demos and explain in detail how the scripter managed to achieve everything in the video. This will give you an idea of what can be achieved with the scripting capabilities, whilst at the same time increasing your familiarity with the language. We would like to hear any suggestions you have for the scripting system on our forum.

We hope that the Christmas video sufficiently whet your appetites and gave you an indication of the amount of work that has gone into the mod, and the direction we are taking it.

On a side note, we are still accepting Race maps to be converted to DM maps for the release. More details here: http://forum.mtavc.com/viewtopic.php?t=18487

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