DiSaMe

Hey, I never used to be interested in GTA3/VC versions of MTA. Their popularity must have already been in demise when I joined this community. I only got seriously involved in MTA after MTA SA DM DP1 was released, because of endless scripting capabilities it offered. Most of the time I spent in MTA SA, I did so alone, scripting in my own local server. And even though there were moments I enjoyed playing on other servers, that was usually because they, too, made use of those scripting capabilities. So it's easy to understand why earlier MTA versions didn't catch my interest. However, it's a bit of a sad realization that MTA for GTA3 and VC has been forgotten for the most part. I mean that's where it all started. Sometimes I wish I had been there to experience this greatness in its early days (but I didn't even have the internet connection back then). And because of that, it's nice to see that you guys are still working on it. Still keeping roots of MTA alive - great job! I wish the current MTA supported GTA 3 and VC the way it supports SA - from what I read on other topics, that's how it was initially intended to be. But it's easier said than done.

Downloading the missing files from https://packages.debian.org works for me. At least it did when I tried, which was the last year (maybe even this year too, can't remember). In addition, I don't install them into the system - I put them into some directory and run the server with environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH=path/to/directory instead. So even if not a "proper" solution, it doesn't mess with system directories.

setWeaponProperty can change the damage property, but it will affect all players. To change the amount of damage done by individual players, you can detect the damage using onClientPedDamage and onClientVehicleDamage and calling setElementHealth to reduce the health further, and you may also want to call killPed if the adjusted health gets to 0 or lower, in order to attribute the kill to the attacking player.

If you want to apply the shader to texture, you need engineApplyShaderToWorldTexture. But you're calling engineRemoveShaderFromWorldTexture, which does the opposite thing - it restores the original appearance that was previously modified using engineApplyShaderToWorldTexture.

This block: for theKey,theSound in pairs(spawnedSounds) do -- end was meant to be used separately from the code that starts the sounds. By putting it into the same block, you're stopping the sounds for all peds if the current ped has deadzombie set to true, as it loops through spawnedSounds table. I'd say your initial code is close enough, you just need to use spawnedSounds[peds] to refer to the current ped's sound. But then the warning will still be there, it happens because calling stopSound destroys the sound element, but the (no-longer-valid) handle is still in spawnedSounds table, so when it gets passed to stopSound the next time, you get a warning. You can remove a value from the table by assigning nil to it, so destroying the current ped's sound would look like this: stopSound(spawnedSounds[peds]) -- stop the sound, destroy the sound element spawnedSounds[peds] = nil -- remove the no-longer-existing element from the table But even then, I can think of scenarios where things go wrong. Like for example the loop is executed every 6 seconds, so you call playSound3D and store the result to spawnedSounds[peds] repeatedly, meaning the sound element from the previous execution is still overwritten by new sound element. So the next stopSound call will only stop the ped's most recent sound. I guess the right way to handle this depends on your needs, but in any case, assuming you clean up the sounds from the table after stopping them, you can check if the sound from earlier executions exists by directly checking the value in the table: if spawnedSounds[peds] then -- called if the sound exists else -- called if the sound doesn't exist end

Maybe for a more intuitive understanding, you shouldn't think of them as asynchronous code that executes "alongside" the rest of the code, but rather as code that executes "inside" coroutine.resume. Because that's exactly what happens. When execution enters coroutine.resume, it enters the coroutine, then when it reaches coroutine.yield, it leaves the coroutine and returns from coroutine.resume. Consider this concept of a coroutine-like construct: function resumeCustomCoroutine(co) local nextFunction = co.functions[co.index] nextFunction() co.index = co.index+1 end local testCo = { index = 1, functions = { function() print("first") end, function() print("second") end, function() print("third") end } } resumeCustomCoroutine(testCo) -- prints: first resumeCustomCoroutine(testCo) -- prints: second resumeCustomCoroutine(testCo) -- prints: third You have no problem understanding that all code inside testCo.functions is executed inside resumeCustomCoroutine, do you? And yet, testCo.functions looks like a piece of code that executes "in parallel" to the code that calls resumeCustomCoroutine. You can think of coroutine.resume the same way, only instead of separate functions, you have "segments" between the start of the function, coroutine.yield calls and the end of the function. Lua itself has no such thing like JavaScript's event loop. And I don't know how MTA does things internally, but that doesn't matter - it just makes calls into Lua through event handlers or various callbacks, including those passed to fetchRemote. And wherever you call coroutine.resume from, it will advance the coroutine's execution up to the next coroutine.yield call. Actually, if you look at makeCallback in that link, you can see it calls coroutine.running to store the current coroutine into variable thread, which is later passed (indirectly through nested function, then assertResume) to coroutine.resume. connect function uses makeCallback to create such coroutine-resuming function and passes it as a callback to socket:connect, then calls coroutine.yield to pause its own execution. So not only it's possible in MTA - it's the very same thing I did with fetchRemote, only structured slightly differently.

Your start angle is -270. The stop angle is: When the health is 100: (100 * 6.3 / 2 - 90) = 225 When the health is 0: (0 * 6.3 / 2 - 90) = -90 So the stop angle is always larger than the start angle, making the arc always visible. You need to choose such numbers that the stop angle would match the start angle when the health is 0.

That's the point, you're supposed to do the work from within the coroutine. testFetchAndOutput is an example of such function. It looks like a single function but executes over multiple invocations of the main thread. So you need to transform testFetchAndOutput into something that does all the work you need to do. Well, you shouldn't be resuming this coroutine like that. The coroutine should be resumed when the response data arrives, which the callback in fetchRemoteAsync already takes care of. What you need to do from the main thread is what my example already does, which is creating and starting the coroutine using coroutine.create and a single coroutine.resume call (optionally you can pass arguments to coroutine.resume to be used as arguments for coroutine's function). The rest of the coroutine will execute when response arrives. Until then, the coroutine will be in a suspended state and the main thread (the rest of the stuff that happens in the server, including the code following the initial coroutine.resume call) will be executing. That basically turns the coroutine into a thread - not in a technical "OS thread" sense, but in a logical sense. fetchRemoteAsync doesn't execute instantaneously - between calling and returning, the time passes and other things update on the server. Coroutines allow you to avoid callbacks, but they can't just make asynchronous code run synchronously with respect to the main thread. Even if they could - unless it's some initialization code that runs once on start, you don't want to freeze your server in case the remote server takes a while to respond, do you? In general, coroutines are one of my favorite Lua features. Unfortunately, they're very unpopular, and I'm hardly aware of sources of more info on this. Maybe searching in http://lua-users.org/wiki/ will give you some results. It's not just in Lua that they're unpopular. An analogous feature in other languages that I'm aware of is generator functions in JavaScript (using function*, yield and yield* syntax and iterators) and Python (yield and yield from syntax and iterators). In those languages, it's probably overshadowed by async functions, using async/await syntax - in fact, most likely that's what we would be using for this fetchRemote stuff if it was in those languages instead of Lua. Maybe I should make a tutorial on coroutines someday. But in the end, it's a simple concept, the coroutine execution just advances between coroutine.yield calls every time you resume it.

I don't know what you're calling "different addressing". The reason it enters an infinite loop is because multiple threads cannot execute code in the same Lua state at the same time. So the callback cannot stop the loop because the loop needs to end to allow the callback to execute in the first place. And even if that wasn't a problem, there's another one: Lua executes synchronously with the rest of the stuff in the server, so even if it wasn't an infinite loop, it would still be blocking the server from updating other things until the response from remote server arrives. Instead of calling fetchRemote synchronously, you probably want to execute your own Lua code asynchronously, over multiple Lua invocations. You can achieve that using coroutines, which allow the function execution to stop and resume later. An example: function fetchRemoteAsync(url, opts) local co = coroutine.running() -- Store the current coroutine in a variable local function callback(responseData, errorCode) -- When the response arrives, resume the coroutine stored in variable co. Also -- pass responseData and errorCode as values to be returned by coroutine.yield. coroutine.resume(co, responseData, errorCode) end fetchRemote(url, opts, callback) -- Pause the execution of the current coroutine. It will be -- resumed when coroutine.resume gets called for this coroutine -- and any additional arguments will be returned. local responseData, errorCode = coroutine.yield() -- The coroutine has resumed, return the data. return responseData, errorCode end function testFetchAndOutput() local responseData, errorCode = fetchRemoteAsync('http://site.com/foo/bar', { method = 'POST', headers = ... }) outputDebugString(responseData) end -- Create a coroutine that will execute testFetchAndOutput local testCo = coroutine.create(testFetchAndOutput) -- Execute the coroutine coroutine.resume(testCo) As a result, fetchRemoteAsync isn't blocking so you can call it and everything else on the server (including Lua code) can execute before it returns. But it can only be called from a coroutine.

Not sure what's the right way to detect when the vehicle drowns - I've been thinking about isElementInWater, but I don't know what exactly that function does. Perhaps it returns true when the vehicle merely touches the water, which isn't enough to count as drowning. If that function doesn't work, then testLineAgainstWater should do the thing. You can check a line from vehicle's position to some point above or something like that. Use getVehicleType to check if the vehicle is a boat or getElementModel in case you want to exclude model IDs, because checking the vehicle type may not be accurate enough - for example, as far as I know, the game considers Vortex a plane (which allows you to control it while in the air). After detecting that a vehicle has drowned, you can make a timer to destroy the vehicle using setTimer and destroyElement.

There seems to be confusion between variables due to a poor choice of names. ped is a table of all peds while peds is the current ped in the iteration. Because of that, the sound handle inserted into the table in one iteration still gets overridden in the other - because ped is the same value between iterations (always refers to the table of all peds). So it's better to swap them. But with the current names, you're supposed to use spawnedSounds[peds] to refer to the current ped's sound, and pass peds to getElementData.

You can get information about world collision data with these functions: getGroundPosition, getRoofPosition, processLineOfSight, isLineOfSightClear.

It's passed to outputChatBox, which requires a string.

You can also implement your own fires using createEffect. This is going to require more work because you'll have to remake the fire mechanics in Lua (spreading, dying out, setting peds/vehicles on fire, extinguishing using fire extinguisher/firetruck) but the upside is that you'll be in full control - such fires will not spread or die out outside control of your script, and you can make them fully synced between all players.

I'm not sure I can think of a scenario where avoiding such problem would be difficult. If you call triggerClientEvent, then there will be a (usually short) window of time when the state of the checkbox has changed on the client side but the signal hasn't arrived at the server yet. But as long as you pass the desired engine state along with the event data, the checkbox state and the actual engine state should be consistent in the end.