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Update on Developer Preview 3 Progress

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 15:51:56 -0500

Hello, its been a while since the last update. You may have seen some of the bug fixes (a big thank you to those who reported them) or some small tidbits about dp3 by reading the forums. You may have also seen some of the changes and additions if you have been reading

mtabeta.com difficulties

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 09:10:16 -0600

We are currently in the process of switching servers for our mtabeta.com community system. This will be causing some downtime for the entire system, but we expect this to be fixed later on today.

Update 5/2/2008

For all of our new users trying to install the Multi Theft Auto: San Andreas Developer Preview 2 release: the installer relies on the above system, which is currently not online. A result of this is that the installer will fail to provide you with a serial which is needed to launch the application.

We kindly ask you to hold on a little longer for our next Develo

Query protocols

Sat, 26 Jan 2008 18:17:39 -0600

We have noticed some stability problems with the All-Seeing Eye master query servers, leading to issues with the in-game server browser for some Multi Theft Auto users.

We are currently in the process of developing our own server/master query protocol to replace

MTA: SA Deathmatch 1.0 Development Preview 2

Wed, 09 Jan 2008 18:06:03 -0600

We've been very pleased with the reaction to our first developer preview we released last week. We've had fun playing with some of the community and it's be great to see what people have got up to with our powerful scripting/mapping system!

We've s

MTA: SA Deathmatch 1.0 Development Preview 1

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 17:17:07 -0600

v1.0-dp1 (2 Jan 2008, 24MiB)

It's the moment you've been waiting for! It's the moment we've been waiting for!

We're happy to announce a preview release of MTA: SA Deathmatch as a good start to the new year. As a new years resolution, we've decided to try much more frequent releases. We've said this before, but we've finally got a solid base to work from and a we're in a good position where you - the community - can give us valuable input.

Happy Christmas!

Tue, 25 Dec 2007 08:55:57 -0600

We'd like to wish everyone a very Happy Christmas! We'd love to be giving you a release as a gift, but unfortunately we're not quite there yet - almost - but not quite. Watch this space!

In the meantime, as is now traditional, here's our Christmas video. We've not had time to give it a Christmas theme - like last years - but it gives you a glimpse of footage from a few of the 'mass tests' we've been having over the last week and a half.

The Weekly Write-Up - December, Week 4

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 11:28:47 -0600

It's the last week before the Christmas holidays. Everyone can feel the vibes of the upcoming celebrations in your homes, But how was it going with MTA during this week, you may ask?

Well, it certainly was a busy week, possibly the most busy week ever. ChrML has worked on the bandwidth usage optimisation recently. By doing so he quite drastically decreased the amount of traffic going from the server to clients.
He also fixed some smaller and recently discovered bugs, like Quick Connect dialog not remembering the last used password, an issue with compressed resources having some directories inside them, armor not being reset on spawn, or further bugfixes to the player sliding problem.

IJs has put lots of work into reviving MTASA DM server's support for *nix systems lately, and additionally he has worked on polishing the presentation of the mod, ready for release. Results are very promising so far, and we hope you'll agree come release time.

Kevuwk and Jax have fixed some crashes in both client and server. Also QA has worked hard this week, providing fixes to some gamemode- or resource-specific bugs apart from their usual commitments. Overall - 45 bugtracker reports were marked as resolved over these past 7 days.

We also have been making progress with our internal tests lately, trying to determine the mods stability and bandwidth usage under higher player counts. We ran into some problems with them recently, however they didnt seem to be caused directly or indirectly by MTA itself. We intend to continue with stress-testing though, to make sure all goes well so far.

The Weekly Write-Up - December, Week 3

Sat, 15 Dec 2007 05:38:45 -0600

This is going to be a lazy update, so bare with me.

The Development Team has been hard at work nailing down small issues and introducing some tweaks throughout the entire code base. I actually can't think of a project within the Client or Server that hasn't been touched this week.

The Weekly Write-Up - December, Week 2

Fri, 07 Dec 2007 18:25:56 -0600

And so another week comes to a close. The driving force of the mod has been exceptional. This has been reflected with changelogs, which are being filled at a decent pace every day.

First, I'll start off by being completely honest: shortly after last week's write up, we ran into somewhat of a crisis. Suddenly, DM's stability went down the drain over the period of 24 hours. Obviously, this led to huge worries all round.

It took around two days of hard work from the MTA team, and thorough testing from QA to get anywhere. The issue was traced back to vehicles, and I can thankfully say that it was eliminated entirely. On top of this, we've seen fixes in terms of vehicle sync, and general issues surrounding vehicles - including those to do with drivebys, explosions and potential crashes.

Once this issue was finally gone, everyone could start progressing again. We've had fixes in model loading, plus tweaks in MTA's "Access Control List (ACL)". The ACL controls all permissions of resources and players, ensuring security - you wouldn't want a small map trying to take control of admin, would you?

There have also been various fixes in terms of scripting consistency, including event cancelling (which will be a lot more clearer come release), and event handlers (see scripting tutorials).

On top of this, there have been numerous “on-connect” issues that have been patched up. These generally are to do with loaded resources causing issues for players that join the server midway (if you’ve been watching changelogs, this issue has been referred to as “PE6”).

Lastly, we’ve seen a tweak in some already existing code. Some of GTA’s internal stunt code was exported to script – with events onClientPlayerStuntStart and onClientPlayerStuntFinish, which are triggered when a player performs stunts such as a two wheel bonus, wheelie or a stoppie. This should allow for flexibility, and it is up to gamemode writers to decide how they want to reward stunters.

I can say it has been a very hectic week. Despite this, enthusiasm has remained high and I expect this to continue.

Keep the comments coming, but we'd encourage you to avoid discussing MTA's merits compared to other mods - thanks.

The Weekly Write-Up - December, Week 1

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 15:41:59 -0600

Another strong week means another weekly write-up, yeah!

The streamer received another fix which could cause objects not to appear when they should be streamed in, or disappear if they were already streamed in. This would occasionally lead to a crash after a period of time, and obviously a general desync between players. This was caused by large objects being close to one another in the streamer, and the streamer not being aware of some of GTA's limits. A few other streamer fixes made there way in, including some changes to pickup streaming.

Some additional GUI changes were introduced, including some fixes around using scrollable panes and the memo fields. A lot of safety code was also added to help prevent scripts from referencing invalid GUI objects if they failed to create, or if they were created with an invalid parent GUI object. A few scripting functions were also added, such as GetFont and SetFont, which can be used to swap between the useable GUI fonts.

Vehicles received a few more updates, including a fix to a fairly substantial bug where placed vehicles could fall through the map if the custom map object was not loaded at that time. When the custom map object was eventually loaded, the vehicles would be in the wrong location or not on the map at all. Exploding vehicles also received a fix where a crash could occur if the vehicle was deleted while the vehicle was in the middle of exploding. A vehicle would be deleted if the script removed it or was unloaded, the streamer forced it to stream out, and various other scenarios.

The Weekly Write Up - November, Week 4

Sat, 24 Nov 2007 14:46:17 -0600

Another week, so another write-up. Since the last newspost, 35 bug reports were marked as resolved.

Within these, one issue was where players could be found choking on your screen (eg. by the result of smoke grenade), but werent actually on theirs. ChrML put some effort into synchronising it, which also allowed to implement scripting function isPlayerChoking that can detect this. He also fixed an odd and recently discovered synchronisation issue, which was causing vehicle desync (if you had a passenger in your vehicle who timed out, vehicle would warp back to the last location you were before he lost the connection with the server locally).

Some GTASA weapon and player synchronisation glitches were also fixed this week. One example is where you could get desynced if you were near a car with a weapon, allowing you to run around locally (even faster than usual) while staying still for remote players. In some cases it could also lead to shooting a weapon without losing the ammo locally. This bug was discovered quite long ago - during the first dm alphas, however its finally fixed now.
Another glitch was related with increased firing rate for some weapons. Both were fixed by ChrML as well.

eAi has also put some effort into getting the mod by fixing issues like improper animations when entering a Vortex, radio music appearing when being glued to a car, or problems with automatic resource updating upon their reupload.

Other developers like MrJax and kevuwk did some fixes to broken scripting functions and functions/

The Weekly Write Up - November, Week 3

Fri, 16 Nov 2007 18:03:31 -0600

This week has proven to be one of the most intense weeks of development for a long time. I'm sure you will have noticed your changelog monitors flooding with fixes and tweaks. We've had numerous small fixes, alongside some major advancements for long term MTA

The Weekly Write-Up - November, Week 2

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 15:48:42 -0600

Another successful week has come to an end. This week has seen a lot of changes made throughout all areas of the code base.

A lot of time this week was spent tidying up the GUI functions, and getting a lot of annoying bugs ironed out. The destroy code will now also destroy all child elements as expected on resource end, and child elements will be called correctly when parent events occurs. This relates to MTA's element system in which every game entity represents a place in an "element tree".

The Weekly Write-Up - November, Week 1

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 18:46:18 -0500

The last week has seen an increasing number of show-stopper bugs fixed, and a strong focus on tidying up the mod to make it ready for beta.

Thanks to everyone who added comments to the last news posting. The general consensus seems to be that you just want to be kept more informed on the status of the mod, and for us to elaborate on what the changes on the change log actually mean. Going forward, the MTA /

General Update

Sat, 27 Oct 2007 18:20:29 -0500

Things have been progressing well within the mod on the road to beta. As you may have noticed in the change log, there has been a lot of activity coming from a number of developers. This has seen a lot of long standing bugs squashed, and a bit of a morale boost which every team needs now and then.

Wine compatibility

Sun, 23 Sep 2007 09:07:43 -0500

As a fellow QA member was running a Gentoo Linux install on his primary computer, he decided to spend a little time giving the latest development version of MTA:SA a go on Wine. After having some initial trouble caused by an outdated version of Wine, he upgraded to the latest available snapshot (0.9.45) only to find out the MTA:SA build ran straight away without any problems or glitches so far!

Little progress update and a new video

Thu, 06 Sep 2007 15:08:33 -0500

Changelog monitors were placed on the site a while ago, and as you can see there has been some progress pretty much every day. The length of our top priority bugs list has been decreasing rapidly over the last few weeks as you may have noticed by the many bugfixes in the changelog monitors.

MTA Center is back online!

Tue, 14 Aug 2007 17:40:00 -0500

With some help of AlienX, MTA Center is yet available again after a long period of downtime and its ready to be used.

For those who arent familiar with our center: MTA Center is a community site where you can share your maps for MTA:SA Race (v1.1.1) and view, rate and comment those of other users. Server administrators have the ability to use RSS feeds in conjunction with our map updater tool - this will allow you to keep up to date with the latest maps (grouped into different map types and styles).

Unfortunately, during the server relocation some newer maps were lost in the process. Nonetheless, our MTA center currently serves a collection of over 6400 user-created maps available for you to pick from.

As for us, were still alive. Some of you may have noticed that our gallery is updated daily for a while now - you can check it now and then if you wish.

Server maintenance

Mon, 06 Aug 2007 15:49:51 -0500

You may have noticed our website being down for a few hours. This was caused by maintenance of the server due to some necessary software upgrades which required us to shutdown the webserver for a short period of time.

Now that we are running the latest software on our server, this website will continue to function as normal without any problems. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Update and Beta News

Wed, 13 Jun 2007 14:44:00 -0500

It's been a while since our last update and i'm sure you will be happy to hear that progress is still being made. We have put a freeze on new features in a bid to get a release out to the community. Our main goals currently are to fix any bugs that may cause a problem if the mod was to be released and for the QA team to test all of the scripting functions and events that we have made available to them. The QA team also regularly get together and perform a mass test which helps reveal any bugs and helps test that any fixes made are effective.