Multi Theft Auto (MTA) is a multi-player modification
for Rockstar North's Grand Theft Auto game series. It is the world's
first reverse engineered modification to incorporate multi-player into a closed-source single-player PC
game.
Originally founded back in early 2003 as an
experimental piece of software, Multi Theft Auto has since grown into
an advanced multiplayer platform for gamers and third-party developers.
Starting with MTA for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, you can play Grand Theft Auto on-line with your friends, in your own custom created maps and gamemodes, powered by the Lua scripting language and hundreds of game specific functions.
Following the recent imminent shutdown of the All-Seeing Eye server browser, and the ongoing popularity of the Multi Theft Auto: San Andreas Race, we have decided to release an update to allow its players to continue playing, although we strongly recommend anyone to upgrade to the more recent Deathmatch releases due to their significantly extended functionality and active development.
The new release with version number v1.1.2 can be downloaded via the Race download page and contains the following notable changes:
- All-Seeing Eye server-browser has been removed in favour of a more reliable and faster replacement
- Removed redundant "MTA Center" references
- Removed support for built-in error reporter
We encourage people to provide us with any feedback or problems with the update (e.g. through our IRC channel).
The upcoming Developer Preview 3 release of Deathmatch will also include the server browser replacement among some other features and fixes and will be released shortly after.
Update: If you're having errors about missing d3dx9_33.dll, download it from here and extract it to your GTA directory. Alternatively, download the latest DirectX updates by using this installer.
As you may know, all our Multi Theft Auto versions up until now have relied on UDPSoft's All-Seeing Eye system to list game servers you can play on. UDPSoft were bought out by Yahoo! back in September 2004.
Today, the acquisition by Yahoo! has resulted in the unfortunate shutdown of the entire All-Seeing Eye network. As a result, the server browser functionality in all released Multi Theft Auto versions will no longer work.
We are currently working with Game-Monitor.com, a server listing website affiliated with Multi Theft Auto to integrate a new server browsing system. This will be incorporated into the next version of Multi Theft Auto: San Andreas which we will be releasing as soon as possible.
In the meantime, we would strongly recommend you to use the following link that lists the current servers queried by Game-Monitor.com:
Most notable new scripting functions:
- Ped support
- Customizable handling for vehicles
- DirectX drawing
- Clientside money handling
- More pickup functions
- shutdown() function to close down the server
- More xml stuff (xmlNodeGetSubNodes and xmlNodeGetParent)
Most notable improvements and/or bug fixes:
- Heavy emphasis on fixing and improving shooting synchronization issues, as they have been revealed as a major issue by user-created resources. This includes a major change in the streamer.
- Carjacking issues leading to desync problems mentioned above.
- Sliding bugs directly linked to shooting sync mentioned above and sliding bugs that only affected animations.
- No shooting with uzis while crouched is fixed
- Scripting improvements on certain functions (most notably rewritten camera functions).
- Fixing issues discovered in MTAs default resources while using them with certain settings or under certain conditions.
- Continued work on the map editor resource is being done by its QA team developers. They hope to have it done for DP3.
Note: A daily changelog of developer work should resurface sometime after the release of DP3. This is a small list of some of the most major bug fixes for DP3. There are many more unmentioned fixes. The changelog is temporarily gone due to equipment upgrades on the machine that was used by developers to log build changes and automatically update the changelog on this site.
In order to ensure that releases are stable with a large amount of players, MTA is considering changing the mass testing policy from semi-public testing to public testing, in order to achieve the largest player counts possible. The QA team would ensure that the build has no major issues and conduct a public test, perhaps weekly. This action would lead to much more mass testing and more confidence in stability. In effect, it would pave the way for quicker releases. Watch for more news on this, coming soon.
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 Developer Preview 3 release (containing an updated and working installer) - or the launch of our mtabeta.com community system at our new hosting facility, whichever comes first.
We apologize for any inconvenience.
Update 8/2/2008
All issues regarding the mtabeta.com domain and it's hosting should be resolved now. The Developer Preview 2 release should be working fine again now.
On a sidenote, we are planning another server upgrade pretty soon which should be able to provide us with some faster services.
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 the All-Seeing Eye protocol, in collaboration with another large query provider. Besides providing a faster and more stable server browser, we will be able to give you more in-game information about our servers as well.
Hopefully this feature will be in one of the upcoming developer previews.
In case your server browser does not work properly: we would like to redirect you to Game-monitor.com, an on-line server-browser that should contain all the Multi Theft Auto servers that are normally registered in the server browser.
Archives
- January 2008
- MTA: SA Deathmatch 1.0 Development Preview 2 (Wednesday 9 January 2008 (18:06))
- MTA: SA Deathmatch 1.0 Development Preview 1 (Wednesday 2 January 2008 (17:17))
- December 2007
- Happy Christmas! (Tuesday 25 December 2007 (08:55))
- The Weekly Write-Up - December, Week 4 (Friday 21 December 2007 (11:28))
- The Weekly Write-Up - December, Week 3 (Saturday 15 December 2007 (05:38))
- The Weekly Write-Up - December, Week 2 (Friday 7 December 2007 (18:25))
- November 2007
- The Weekly Write-Up - December, Week 1 (Friday 30 November 2007 (15:41))
- The Weekly Write Up - November, Week 4 (Saturday 24 November 2007 (14:46))
- The Weekly Write Up - November, Week 3 (Friday 16 November 2007 (18:03))
- The Weekly Write-Up - November, Week 2 (Friday 9 November 2007 (15:48))
- The Weekly Write-Up - November, Week 1 (Friday 2 November 2007 (18:46))
- October 2007
- General Update (Saturday 27 October 2007 (18:20))
- September 2007
- Wine compatibility (Sunday 23 September 2007 (09:07))
- Little progress update and a new video (Thursday 6 September 2007 (15:08))
- August 2007
- MTA Center is back online! (Tuesday 14 August 2007 (17:40))
- Server maintenance (Monday 6 August 2007 (15:49))
- June 2007
- Update and Beta News (Wednesday 13 June 2007 (14:44))
- May 2007
- Custom models support continued (Sunday 6 May 2007 (18:10))
- April 2007
- Exclusive MTA Interview on GTA-Series.com (Saturday 14 April 2007 (15:50))
- March 2007
- Grand Theft Auto 4 - Official Trailer (Thursday 29 March 2007 (18:09))
- Custom model support! (Monday 26 March 2007 (17:39))
- MTA:SA - Projectiles and Gravity (by MTA QA Team) (Wednesday 14 March 2007 (14:48))
- Scripting videos 6 and 7 (Tuesday 13 March 2007 (18:22))
- Deathmatch fighting styles, recorded (Tuesday 6 March 2007 (05:58))
- MTA "Resources" explained (Sunday 4 March 2007 (15:57))
- February 2007
- Presenting text displays (Thursday 15 February 2007 (18:34))
- Gamemode "Hay" explained in tutorials (Tuesday 6 February 2007 (07:02))
- January 2007
- Another weekly tutorial is out! (Monday 29 January 2007 (13:40))
- Next scripting tutorial available! (Monday 22 January 2007 (06:05))
- MTA weekly script tutorials (Sunday 14 January 2007 (10:03))
- The search for coders has ended (Thursday 11 January 2007 (13:20))
- MTA is looking for experienced coders (Friday 5 January 2007 (13:52))
- December 2006
- Multi Theft Auto gets a new look! (Wednesday 27 December 2006 (14:36))
- The making of the MTA Christmas movie (Wednesday 27 December 2006 (14:36))
- MTA Christmas movie (Wednesday 27 December 2006 (14:31))





