Leaderboard

* clears the dust off his old forum account * Happy birthday MTA! WOW, 20 years! Lots of memories here. I'm one of the few original contributors from the early days (~2003). I introduced novel techniques for injecting code into GTA (MTA:Blue) through my time experimenting with game hacking (yes, the kind where you see through walls, though as an educational exercise). I "studied" under some of the creators that made counterstrike OGC, namely a guy named PharLap, who was insanely smart. Also, some folks in the #winprog channel on EFNet. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine MTA would bring so much joy to so many. I was initially interested in MTA for selfish reasons: Not too long out of high school, I was drifting away from my friend who would play peer to peer GTA2 with me over dialup. When GTA3 came out, I was severely disappointed: No multiplayer support. I quickly realized keeping up a remote friendship by bonding over games wouldn't be possible. I searched around for "GTA multiplayer" on an early Google. Not much came back, except a couple early mods, one by our friend, IJs. Early MTA used to directly overwrite memory from an entirely outside process. Because of the way that worked, the outside process never had true knowledge of what the game was doing. Gameplay was choppy and crashed quite a bit. However, it was still mostly fun. Working with IJs, Cray, eAi, and others, we started development on a new foundation for the mod based on the premise of injecting code directly into GTA. That foundation was called MTA:Blue. It was actually modeled after some of the naming conventions and structures in Quake (the source was available by this point), except we had additions for hooking various subsystems. I'm sure I have some backup artifacts on old disks somewhere but I'm remote at the moment. I remember the fun problems. There were very hard problems for us to figure out how the game worked, and how internal memory structures worked with zero access to source code (I distinctly remember discussing this often with eAi). It's akin to feeling your way around a room when it's pitch black, using intuition and past knowledge to reason about what likely steps to take to make progress on our goals. Seeing players move around live in game--after contributions from folks like Cray who developed initial "net code" -- were super fun. We also had a prototype for in game voice communication around 2004 or so. Then came the editors, scripting, etc which added fuel to the fire and made MTA truly remarkable. Since MTA was basically GTA itself by this point, I remember needing a GUI. I prototyped CEGUI in, and others piled in to add additional elements. The in-game menu system was born. We added health bars, and all the fancy foundational stuff that made it feel less like a mod and more like just a solid game. Yes cray, I still remember your g4tv interview! Haha. It was cool. EDIT: Speaking of drama, I also remember when Rockstar added DRM to San Andreas that seemed to spell the end of the mod. I remember figuring out a bypass, and the subsequent demo we posted for the forum showing SA was ON. What an exhilarating experience. I remember the drama. A certain developer we had who ran off with our source and open sourced it as their own under a different name (early MTA was not open source). I remember seeing my name in the source files they produced and claimed as their own. Awkward! I'm still amazed that so many people play MTA. While I haven't been actively involved in ages (same as eAi--circa 2007), I actively watch progress and keep tabs. I also idle on discord, so say hi Lots of friends that I know in there. I would love to meet some folks in person at some point in my life over a beer. As others have said, MTA was really a bunch of dorks working remotely at their houses and communicating over IRC. As others have said, working on MTA has definitely impacted my life trajectory. I was hired into a (then) little known cybersecurity company named Rapid7 in 2005 (went public in 2015). I was CTO at another security company, and I currently run https://furl.ai with a bunch of super smart people.

Hello everyone! Winter is just around the corner, and so is the Holiday Season. Would it not be great if you could start them with a fresh "A Year in Recap" post to read, just like the usual? And surprise, surprise - we have you covered! We have prepared a brief summary of the past year with all the important stuff that happened in 2023 from an MTA fan's perspective. And there is more than just that, so be sure to read the entire post! Screenshots were courtesy of Nebla. 2023 in Recap There were a few important highlights for us this year. At the very beginning of the year, we had unbanned (almost) everyone who had ever received a global MTA ban. A risky move, you might have thought? As it turned out, we were actually quite pleased in how it fared in the end. Next, we had celebrated Multi Theft Auto's 20th Anniversary on 9th of February. Aside from the lengthy feature post with some media, many of our community members also shared their memories with MTA in the celebratory forum post. You all are also welcome to chip in and post your experiences there. Few days after that, I interviewed IJs - Multi Theft Auto's founder - about his experiences with the project. Feel free to check it out if you have not done so already, as it also featured screenshots from our other projects. One day in April, we had encountered minor disturbances with our perception, but all is fine now. Yllufepoh... Later on, we had opened a beta testing phase for our next major release. After the testing was over, we had released Multi Theft Auto: San Andreas 1.6 in June. This is still our current stable release, which works best on Windows 10 and Windows 11 operating systems. It is not just us who had their anniversaries - SAES, a long-time MTA clan/gang were also celebrating the 20th Anniversary of their community. We are happy to see such long-time communities that have been around for almost as long as MTA itself, and we will be always looking forward to give them the spotlight. This year had also seen some developments regarding the next game in the Grand Theft Auto series. Rockstar Games was celebrating the 25th anniversary of the creation of their studio, for which they published the first trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI in December. The game is planned to launch in 2025 on PlayStation and XBox platforms. The PC version was not announced at this time, but it is possible that it will come out some time after console releases as usual. We also had some developments of our own. We had improved the Discord integration with MTA:SA client - this was made available for testing in our nightly builds. And recently, we have started featuring your media on our social media outlets, as a part of our Community Spotlights program. Want to be featured too? See one of the announcements on our Discord. A bunch of interesting MTA:SA-related YouTube videos from this year Current player counts and version fragmentation statistics Type Amount of players Date / Time Recent peak number of concurrent unique players 32,611 players 2023.12.10 (at 18.43 GMT) Highest recorded number of concurrent unique players 52,098 players 2020.04.02 (at 18.00 GMT) Recent number of daily unique players 119,707 players 2023.12.03 (Sunday) Highest recorded number of daily unique players 185,818 players 2018.02.03 (Saturday) Recent number of monthly unique players 552,402 players November, 2023 Highest recorded number of monthly unique players 805,903 players January, 2018 The numbers are lower than in the last year, but there are still many MTA players out there. According to Steam Statistics, the number of players is more or less similar to games like PayDay 2, ARK: Survival Evolved or Garry's Mod. MTA:SA version or series Percentage of players using that version or series as of 23rd of December, 2023 1.6.0 96.5% 1.5.9 2.8% 1.5.8 0.1% 1.5.7 (and older) 0.5% 1.4.x + 1.3.x 0.1% Also as of 23rd of December, 2023: 76,250 members have joined our Discord server, we have got 13,826 followers on X/Twitter, 58k users follow our Facebook fanpage, and our Steam Community group has 43,115 members. Status update Not much to report at the moment. Projects like ours depend on the volunteer work and community contributions, so things can get slower at times. We are always looking for new staff members for the project, be it developers, moderators, content creators or managers. If you would like to contribute or test your skills, feel free to reach out to us on our Discord or via forum PMs. We have a bunch of things kept on our backlogs too, so we might consider re-visiting them in the upcoming year. --- We hope that you all will enjoy the Holiday Season and wish you all the best in 2024! -- MTA Team Credits for the content submissions: Dutchman101, Haxardous, Nebla, xLive.

A Roleplay setting that this community has truly needed for a long time! Finally something fresh and unique and I absolutely love playing on the server, keep it up guys!

Happy new year! Here are some screenshots from my gallery: TGB Jukebox @Zango in the restroom: TO SHO!!!