It's this time of the year again and like before, there has been a lot of stuff going on with Multi Theft Auto. The development seems to be going well since we have opened the source for the project - there have been over 150 changes made to the code since the last post, making for an average of over 5 commits a day. You can track these changes yourself through our page on Google Code.

Additionally, a bunch of new developers have contributed to the project, either by submitting patches for fixing bugs (like fog flicker fix for users with ATI graphics cards or compatibility fixes for the linux server) or by adding new features (different skins now have their own voices, rather than all having CJ ones; initial joystick support - we will write more about this one in our next status update), all of which are certainly a benefit to the project. 

Also, lil_Toady has recently introduced initial support for loading and using custom sounds in MTASA. It is currently compatible with a wide variety of formats including MP3, WAV, OGG, RIFF, MOD, XM, IT and S3M. Along with already available custom map and model support, this will allow you to further customize the game by making it possible to add your own sounds or music to your maps and gamemodes.

In other news, we have also opened another project on Google Code dedicated to the resources included or to-be-included with the final MTASA server release. You can use them with your nightly build server, as they should be fully compatible with MTASA 1.0. You can also contribute to this project by sending your updates to the currently available resources (which would contain bugfixes, new features or just improvements in the way they work), or send your own resources for us to review, if they're useful for most people and ready for general use. The project can be found here.

Just like we have mentioned in the last post, we have introduced the roadmap for the mod. Keep in mind however that while it should give you a bigger picture of what needs to be done before release, it is not fully accurate due to the nature of the mod.

That being said, we would like to wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Let's hope that the upcoming year will allow us to bring you even better news! 

And here's a Christmas tree to celebrate the occasion:

You can comment on this news post through our forums. 

-The MTA Development and QA teams.

We have been preparing this announcement for some time - this will mark the end of our "Developer previews".  We are working towards releasing the 1.0 version; this version is no longer a "preview" and will be a turning point for the release of Multi Theft Auto.

Why? Today we are marking a new milestone in the history of Multi Theft Auto. After over 11000 revisions since 2004, contributions by over 16 world-wide developers, 1554 files and well over 550.000 lines of mostly C/C++ code, we have made the decision to re-launch Multi Theft Auto as an open-source project.

Of course, the migration to open-source is more than just slamming your undocumented source code in a zip up for anyone that is interested. In the past weeks, we have spent significant time cleaning up our entire code repository, by adding proper documentation in files and tagging them with headers, cleaning up any obsolete or ugly code we came across, and backtracking the logs of all files to ensure that the proper credits to developers were noted inside each individual file.

By open sourcing our project, we are encouraging anyone who is willing to participate in this project, to participate. For that reason, we are not "just" offering our source code: we have also opened our bug tracker and will be offering public access to our nightly build system that will be compiling a build every day (and has been long used for testing purposes). This way, any developer will be able to run the latest revisions, file bugs or submit patches.

Some may be concerned with us seemingly throwing our code and all its secrets out on the streets. Remember that, as we have seen in the past, a proper and solid multiplayer modification needs a lot more than just memory addresses and offsets. We hope that developers will be attracted towards contributing to our project, which is fairly straightforward and has an already established user base, instead of starting from scratch.

As of today, our entire code repository will be available from Google Code, which will be hosting our project. If you are interested in participating in development, you may be familiar with the process with other open-source projects: any developer that thinks his or her modifications should be merged into our trunk can submit a patch containing their modifications to our bug tracker. Each patch will then be reviewed and hopefully merged by the development team.

We believe that access to our source code will not only encourage developers to contribute, but will also be important for educational reasons: our modification is built in a highly modularized class-based design similar to that of other somewhat bigger projects. Of course, it is far from perfect, but this leaves some good room for improvement.

By no means does the migration mean that development has stopped or that progress was halted:  we've simply decided to try a new approach to replace the old development style.  The community can now follow any progress that is made, and even see the changes for themselves.  By open sourcing, we open up the possibility of allowing unlimited community contribution - through our bugtracker, the development wiki, the community center, and of course the code itself.

Bear in mind that this migration does not imply a new release. We will be restarting our versioning, meaning that the next first release will be 1.0. Our roadmap will be available shortly on our bug tracker, so everyone will be able to track our development towards 1.0 and future versions. Nightly developer builds are also available, but are not recommended for anything else but development usage, as they will contain bugs and are updated daily.

In order to access our development facilities, head over to our community page (you'll need an account). If you're interested in checking out the code repository, head over to our Google Code project page. We'll be working towards smoothening everything out the next few days.

You can comment on this news post through our forums.

-The MTA team.

We found yet another set of critical bugs that affect all recent versions of Multi Theft Auto (using the new game-monitor.com protocol instead of the now defunct All-Seeing Eye), caused by a developer's poor practice of coding in our server browser.

One bug involves a severely incorrect parsing method of the server list. In the worst case, this means that for a lot of our players, no servers (or only a few) show up at all. This depends on the actual server count registered by the master server list.

The second bug involves invalid bit arithmetic on the IP-address, effectively causing a completely random number of servers not to show up on the list. In practice this means that probably a lot of servers don't show up correctly for our players.

This issue has been fixed and will be incorporated in the next public release. We are very unhappy with this problem as it prevents a lot of first-time users from playing. We apologize for any inconvenience and strongly recommend people to use Game-Monitor.com for a reliable list of servers for now.

As part of our server move from Dallas, Texas in the United States to our custom hardware in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, we have also completed the migration of our IRC server to a new location. Our IRC server is part of the GTAnet IRC network and provides a discussion place for anyone who's interested in Multi Theft Auto, Grand Theft Auto or related subjects.

The actual IRC server details have not changed, so feel free to visit us in #mta at irc.multitheftauto.com .

We would like to give you a little information on what we have been doing on our next version in the last few weeks.

First of all, some changes have been made that significantly affect the performance of several subsystems. For instance, our 2D GUI system, 3D DirectX drawing functions and some entity code (e.g. blips) have been optimized in order to speed up the scripts that use these things.

Apart from this, our internal network code has also been given an overhaul in the hope of increasing stability and performance for both the client and server.

Internally, our code repository was cleaned up a bit (and is still in the process of being cleaned). Needless to say, this doesn't really affect the end-user since all the compiled code remains the same either way.

Several synchronisation bugs and in-game glitches regarding peds and vehicles have been fixed.

Our serial/community user system is being revised so that it will be more stable, which is necessary because of the bugs introduced in our previous versions, which, as you may know, was partially caused by a failure of the (third-party) system that we relied on.

Apart from the mandatory fixes and tweaks, some new features have been implemented. To find out which things are new, I recommend you to take a look at our Client Scripting Functions and Server Scripting Functions pages on our wiki, which are updated with new specifications as we implement stuff. An example of things you will be able to find on there are functions for: DirectX drawing, GTA effects, garages, camera manipulation, and more.

On a sidenote: as some already know, we have registered a new domain "mtaiv.com", who knows for what to come.

Also, be sure to check out our community center from time to time (especially for people running or wanting to run servers), as it hosts all sorts of game-modes, maps and scripts, and is updated by third-party script developers on a regular basis.