Leaderboard

Have you played one of these racing maps? Basically, people need to help one person get to the end of the map. Here's a cool example of a teamwork map. Something unique

* 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.

This is an amazing milestone. I've not been involved really now since around 2007-8, but for some years Multi Theft Auto was (almost) my life. I spent most of my nights and spare time as a teenager and while at University focused on developing MTA. I started playing almost back at the start - probably a month or so after the initial MTA for GTA 3 was released. I remember trying to play - and finding the experience really quite bad - endless crashes and loads of limitations, but I loved MTA from the start: the way it opened my eyes to a technical way of achieving was initially seemed impossible, the ambition of the project and the enthusiastic community around the project. Everyone could see what MTA should be - the product vision was obvious - it was just a massive challenge to get it there. As I was a fairly competent Visual Basic programmer (the first version of MTA was built by modifying an existing trainer for GTA3) I was able to get involved and help out fairly quickly. IJs let me join around the time that MTA:Blue was just starting development. This was a big rewrite of MTA and the foundations of what MTA is today. I cut my teeth as a C++ programmer with this project which was really ambitious - we were almost writing a parallel game engine alongside the GTA engine that had to map almost 1-2-1 to it. This involved learning a lot of techniques for reverse engineering, C++ and assembly language. At this time, there was probably a core of 2-3 people working actively on the project in their spare time as developers and there was a lot of pressure to deliver something. We deliberately picked an easier goal - adding a racing mode, so that we didn't need to achieve some challenging features such as shooting synchronization. MTA Race was a big success and it was around this time that we had the rise of other copycat mods which really heaped on the pressure. At times the community seemed to turn into a battlefield between the different mods with cheaters thrown in the mix. We also had to handle various people from the cheating community making cheats as performing DDOS attacks against our infrastructure. Now days these things are easier to mitigate against, but as a small volunteer run project, these caused us a lot of hassle. After MTA Race, we were really ambitious with what we wanted to achieve - we wanted to add scripting to the game, and we wanted to build a modding infrastructure that was really flexible. I remember being proud of designing the resource system that MTA is still using today (though I'd definitely do some things differently now!) The version we released was really powerful - with a pretty good, extensible editor, downloadable resources, a web admin interface and pretty good synchronisation of gameplay. At times during the development I was the only developer for a while, so I like to think that MTA wouldn't have survived if I hadn't carried on fighting to make progress. I remember spending a whole summer trying to get shooting to work! But I think MTA was such a strong idea and had such a fan base that I'm sure someone would have picked up the torch. Now days I run a small games development company (www.fireboltgames.com) and I've worked professionally in the games industry for the last 15 years, and I'm certain I wouldn't have got where I am or have the skills I do without MTA, and for that I'm really glad. It's still one of the most successful things I've worked on and one I'm really proud of. It's certainly the longest-lived! We actually created a Roblox game recently inspired by the Hay mode made by Aaron for MTA - check it out here: https://www.roblox.com/games/6645345380/Climb-King The community around MTA was what made it all worth it - it was hard work, but there were so many good, enthusiastic people, all working together towards a common goal. We never met - we never even talked (this was before voice-chat was so widely available!) - but we were good friends and had a lot of respect for each other. All in all, this is a really well deserved milestone and I'm so glad I had a chance to be part of the history of this great project. Here's to another 20 years! PS: I designed the front page about 16 years ago - it is probably time to update it! Here's a few random screenshots from my archive: MTA:Green (MTA:Blue for GTA3, never released): http://opencoding.net/old_opencoding_net/misc/MTA/green_progress_6.JPG Old website design: http://opencoding.net/old_opencoding_net/misc/MTA/mta_site_design_2.jpg http://opencoding.net/old_opencoding_net/misc/MTA/mta_hud_9d.JPG