The QA team has just this minute got their greasy paws on beta 16. We've fixed 49 issues in this beta. Beta 16 took a surprisingly long time to get out - this is because we want it to be as close to Release Candidate (RC) standard as possible, and we think we've done this. RC for those of you not aware of the term is like a beta build - in that its tested with a group of people, but it is intended to be complete - all the features are there, all known major issues that are practical to fix are fixed. It is intended to catch any last minute "show stopper" bugs, rather than fix minor issues which is what beta builds are for.

We hope to have a RC out to our beta team over the next few days, assuming beta 16 is well received. We'll also be expanding the QA team for the RC stages to some extent. As usual do not ask if you can beta test, its a sure way to not get a place.

In this beta we've also added some new name tags as the previous ones were causing some issues behind the scenes and didn't look too good, as well as the aforementioned anti-cheat system.

Edit: Kent has just informed us that he is now engaged to the (we assume lovely) Emily. I think he's pretty excited about it (I'd be damned scared!) - so wish him luck!

Ed

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We'd just like to wish everyone a very happy Christmas. As we're still not quite ready to release MTA, we've made a video, which you can now download from the videos page.

Download the video here.

Happy Christmas!

Update: HTTP downloads are now available - we hope everyone has had a good day!

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We've just released the internal beta 17 to the QA team, which fixes 23 issues in total. Beta 16 had a number of critical issues that have been resolved in beta 17. We are nearing Release Candidate stage, though we know that beta 17 isn't quite there yet - a few outstanding issues surounding the anti-cheat and a memory leak in the map editor have yet to be resolved. Neither should take too long, thankfully.

Anyway, if you haven't yet seen our Christmas video that shows off some of the maps that we intend to release with the first version, click here.

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You all know the dedicated server now has a console interpreter. Now, I think I forgot to explain what a console interpreter actually is, and I forgot to show you some examples as well </img>

The new console interpreter means that you, as a server administrator, can now fully control the server from inside the server itself.

Remember the dedicated server from all earlier MTA versions? You just ran it and it worked, but you couldn't do anything inside the server window.

With the Blue dedicated server you can type stuff inside the console, perform admin commands (kick, ban, freeze, etc.) and more. I think this interactivity will make the dedicated server more attractive to anyone who wants to run a server.

Besides.. the server also comes with a nice status bar on top, fully customizable from the SDK (of course), currently showing you how many players are actually in it, how many maps, etc.

Just see for yourself </img>

Linux version



Windows version

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We've just released our internal beta version 18. We're really happy with how this looks, it may be renamed Release Candidate 1 (for info on what Release Candidates are, see previous posts), depending if any issues crop up when testing. We've fixed 45 issues in this beta, the majority of which are minor and only a couple were introduced in beta 17 (which is a good sign!). I personally worked on making the editor easier to use and ChrML has worked on some of the game logic and fixed a memory leak (we think there may be one more though </img> ) Oli has fixed a few issues server-side relating to admin and similar things. There are very few issues remaining from previous beta versions, and we obviously hope we haven't introduced any new ones in this beta.

Well, theres not much more to say - we hope everyone had a good new years day!

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I'm happy to say that we just this minute release the first release candidate to the QA team for them to test. We obviously hope this release candidate is the only one required, but its too soon to say if thats the case or not. As far as I'm aware, there are no open issues that require fixing, so anything that does get changed that requires a new release candidate will either have been introduced in this release candidate or will not have been found previously.

We fixed 24 issues in this release almost all were minor. In total over this QA period for the first public beta we've fixed 439 issues - we never guessed when we started out 7 months ago to the day that this would take so long, but we all hope we've built a stable base for future developments and a couple of fun mods for you to play with.

Thats not to say the public beta will be bug free, of course, not even release quality software is. Theres quite a few issues that we've "suspended" for future patches, either because we can't track down their origin (which I'm sure the community will be able to help with), because they're too trivial to spend the time on or because they would delay the release by too much.

We'll update you on how the release candidate is received soon.

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We've tested RC1 quite extensively - we had a 16+ player test yesterday and it went really well. It seems we have one crash that we're not sure the origin of - its pretty rare anyway. I'm going to look into this tomorrow and see if we can fix it. If I can't find the origin of it, we'll have to release without it and enlist the community's help in finding it's cause. Anyway, apart from that, RC1 is pretty much perfect - we've made a few changes for the voting system for an RC2 as currently it is too easy for people who have lost a race to vote to change to another race, meaning that the winner never actually finishes - frustrating for them!

We also had the pleasure of inviting PlanetGrandTheftAuto.com to join us in the test - they've got a news item on the subject on their site and an exclusive screenshot - head over to www.planetgrandtheftauto.com to check it out! Expect a full review, screenshots and videos from them as we near the release.

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We've just released Release Candidate 2 to the QA team. The main change in this RC is a fix for the crash I mentioned earlier - it turned out this was caused by a small mistake in someones code that managed to cause very erratic crashes. Glad that's out of the way! We've also fixed a couple of other minor issues too...

We've also got some information on server bandwidth usage, which I know some of the companies that provide game server renting are interested in. These are not final and may be inaccurate, but they should give you some idea. The average upload to players is about 35 kilobits per second (4.3 kilobytes per second) per player for clients. For the server, the bandwidth required increases exponentially per player that joins. This clearly is lower for a smaller number of players and higher for a larger server.

Interestingly, when testing, it appears that many races are best played with a smaller number of players. Obviously this is up to the map creator, but a standard race seems to work best with under 16 players, whereas free-roam races can have many more. This is from my experience of our testing, I'm sure some map creators can make some really good 32 player races too, many of them just get too crowded (particularly at the start) with that many players.

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We're getting really close now guys.

We just released RC3 to the semi-public QA team. If this goes well, this will be the version we release to the public. Initial reports seem to indicate that everything is going great, and it sounds like everyone is having a blast.

Kent

Added by JHXP:

We urge all Xfire users to sign THIS petition to add support for Multi Theft Auto! =)

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Today we've pretty much stress tested our entire release, as you will most likely read in any upcoming posts on this blog, the site and/or the forum.

In this short post I'll be giving you some results of the measurements I've been doing on our primary beta test server.

The primary server is essentially a dual Xeon 2.8 gHz server with HyperThreading support, 2GB of RAM, running the almighty Debian Linux distribution.

(Most of these measurements were made with 14 players.)

Speaking of processing power, the MTA server doesn't need much: the average CPU usage percentage was lower than 0.5%.

The memory footprint is also very small: with 14 players, only 8 MB of resident (= physical) memory is used.

Bandwidth wise, as said earlier, the measurements tell us the server receives about 0.75 KB/s average (with peaks of 1.0KB/s), and transmits about 4.3 KB/s average (with peaks of 5.7KB/s) per player. These numbers decrease whenever someone dies, so there' s a significant difference between 5 people racing and 15 people racing.

The transmit rate depends on the amount of players. These measurements were made with about 14 people. But don't expect the transmit rate to be 4.3 * 2 = 8.6 KB/s with 28 players, it will most likely be a lot less than that. And besides that.. I bet only 2 of those 28 players will survive the finish line on some of the races I know </img>

Overall, as you can see the server is very lightweight. </img>

It may even run 16 slots on a Pentium II + 64MB + text-based Linux hooked up to a 10mbit line..

Time to power on all your dusty old Pentium's again? Who knows? </img>

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As you may know, Jordan from Planet Grand Theft Auto has been testing the release candidates with us for the past week or so. He's now written a review, complete with screenshots and 3 exclusive videos. Head over to http://www.planetgrandtheftauto.com/featur...cles/mtareview/ to check out the review!

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We've just released the Multi Theft Auto: San Andreas server. Builds are available for Linux and Windows.

The server will not allow you to play Multi Theft Auto: San Andreas As is usual with these kinds of releases, we release the server some time before the client (the program you play with) so that server providers can download and configure their server as they desire.

Head over to http://light.mtavc.com to download the server and to see a count down until we release the game for you to play!

Note for server admins: Anti-cheat is currently disabled in servers, we will enable it when we release the client. To enable anti-cheat after we release, just restart your server. Currently it will display a 404 'file not found' error, this is intentional.

If you have problems setting up your server, please check our wiki or visit our forum.

Feel free to pop into our IRC channel #mta on irc.multitheftauto.com while you wait for the release </img>

Also, we've been asked this many times - you need Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas 1.0 to play MTA:SA when it is released. We do not support any other versions currently.

PlanetGrandTheftAuto.com have put up a FAQ for MTA:SA, which you can view here.

Update: There have been a couple of reported issues with the Windows server, if you are having issues with running a Windows server (most people won't), check this page.

Update: A new installer has been released for windows servers that resolves the aforementioned issues. If you're having issues running a Linux server, please check the news post at www.mtavc.com for a potential fix.

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Almost 8 months ago we started working on a multiplayer modification for a brand new game, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, called Multi Theft Auto (MTA). This release is the first MTA we've ever released based on our new revolutionary "Blue" technology and features the gamemode "Race".

The process of developing this release has been a lot of hard work and quite a few long nights, especially when most of our team members are busy with their real lives, but now we're glad to announce that we're finally ready to show you our work. We've been looking forward to this for a very long time and we're certainly very happy with how it looks. We hope you like it too! Smile

This release also features a very easy to use map editor allowing anyone to create a map containing spawnpoints, checkpoints, objects and "pickups". The maps created can be added to an MTA server and played online with your friends at any time.

Download it here

I'd like to thank our wonderful development team for lots of hard work and the Quality Assurance (QA) team for testing our release extensively and report any bugs they find back to us. We've been doing our best to solve these issues and since the first private beta was given to the QA team 29th August we've fixed a large amount of issues with severities ranging from small tweaks and text fixes to major.

If you encounter problems, check our wiki and our forums. There are also some pointers on planet GTA.

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Well, we've finally got MTA:SA R1 out the door, and I'm sure many of you have started to play feverishly. I've created a couple maps demonstrating just how fun map making (and playing) can be. The maps are titled 'chickenrun' (just something zany I came up with), and there are two in the zip. The first one includes a race to the 'chickenarena' and the second one just starts all the players off at the arena (a big open area with a bunch of obstacles and such).

You can get the chickenrun map pack here.

Also, I've created a command line tool for linux-based operating systems that will relocate a map to a given x/y/z coordinate. You can download that utility here.

Have fun!

-Derek

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We hope everyone is enjoying playing MTA:SA, today for the first time we had over 1000 players playing MTA at once, which is quite an achievement, considering quite a few commercial games do not achieve this </img>. We also had over 20,000 downloads in the first 24 hours, which we're also very happy about - keep spreading the word! Overall the response to MTA:SA R1 has been great - we've had a number of crashes reported to us and we'll be working through them and seeing what we can do to fix them. It appears quite a large percentage are caused by people using the wrong version of GTA, we'll probably add a check for this in a future release.

We've already started work on R2 and some fixes for R1, we hope to have something to show you for these soon - watch this space!

Server admins may have noticed that anti-cheat has not updated for them. This is due to a combination of a change in our webserver config and a somewhat non-standard HTTP request from the server. We will be releasing a patch for this and a few other issues soon, in the meantime you can download the anti-cheat definition file from http://www.mtavc.com/sar1_000.def - the file should be renamed anticheat.def and placed in your mods/race/ folder of your server.

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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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