supersocialist

This may sound like a silly question, but has anybody e-mailed me about working on MTAVC? I got a vague e-mail "regarding my application" with a zipped attachment. My guess is that it's part of the first ugly wave of spam I'm getting at my new e-mail address, but I wanted to make sure I wasn't ignoring anybody important by deleting it.

Thanks, that compiles just fine. Any idea why the Hunter spawns twice? Maybe the spot is a little too high, so it thinks it's no longer there after it falls and hits the pavement? I just finished my Bullet Time mission script in GTAMA. It's available with both the compiled main.scm and the source code at http://home.southernct.edu/~baileyr3/ss-bullettime.zip if you'd like to take a look.

I still can't make a new project compile in Vice, but I've gotten around that by decompiling a stripped script originally compiled in Barton's. Everything's running smoothly now, or would be, if I could get variables to store decimal values...

I've got it sorted out and have some ghetto test code of my own running. I had two problems, which I will detail in case it will help somebody else: When you decompile the project for the first time, do not forget to click the "this is a vice city project" button! Stupid, stupid mistake ... but it decompiled just fine, so I didn't notice what I had done. I spent hours screwing with the code when all I had to do was tell the compiler to make a Vice City .scm instead of GTA3. Also, when creating a new project, the "this is a vice city project" button is greyed and cannot be clicked. There's no obvious way to switch it over to a Vice City version, so what I'm going to do is compile a stripped .scm in Barton's editor, decompile it with gtama, and then start working in the new format from there.

I wish it was just my code that was causing problems, but nothing I do with it works. Decompiling the original main.scm file goes fine, and it looks very nice and readable in the IDE program, and recompiling it also works. When I run Vice City it crashes on a new game, and also crashes on loading an old game (even when the main.scm files should be identical). It seems to be compiling files that simply don't work -- Rockstar's original code should recompile and run just fine, right? Hell, even if it didn't, the blank script created by the decompiler ought to work with the compiler. I'll have to do a clean install of it and screw around some more. Let me know if you get it running for Vice City before I do, if it isn't much trouble.

I have dan's assembler running, and I converted my bullet time script to the format. It compiled fine, but crashes when I start a new game. The new project stripped file doesn't run (although it compiles), and my decompiled stock copy of main.scm also crashes when I recompile and run it. Maybe I downloaded the wrong packages from those links or something. Does anybody who has it working have any suggestions for me? (edit: I wasn't very clear about why it wasn't working, so I clarified.)

I've downloaded dan's assembler and I'm going to take a look at it tonight. I like the format better, I just hope I can get it to run without crashing this time.

I tried Dan's assembler, but I couldn't get it to work. I think the format is a lot nicer and I'd rather use it, or the c-language-style compiler that other guy is working on (and has not yet released). The last time I checked on vGTAasm, it had been abandoned and not picked up, so I started working with Barton's. http://home.southernct.edu/~baileyr3/stripped.zip That's mostly stripped; I think a few pickups are still laying around.

I'm using Barton's editor version .13 at the moment. I've got .135 on hand. Since it requires a fresh decompile, I don't want to switch over until I've more or less finished the scripts I'm working on. I don't want to lose my commenting in the middle of a project. Also: speeding could be varied by map area (airport/docks/haiti/beach1, 2, 3, etc) but not by street. I don't think red light checks and wrong side of the road checks can be handled in main.scm, but they might be accessible from a trainer or the MTA client. That data is all in memory -- ped cars follow the right rules -- but there are no known opcodes for them.

My mad skizills. Well, since you still have the request up, I thought I'd send you a better application than that meager previous post. The linked .zip archive above has a main.scm mod-in-progress that I have been working on for, uh, a day, so it's a little rough around the edges. At the moment I think I am the only person to have released a teargas pickup mod (although it's a simple code change and nothing to really fuss about), and I am loosely affiliated with the GTA: Motor City project. First warning: there's a little debugging code in this script, so you may get some numbers flashing about the bottom of the screen, and if you lay on the horn your fuel will drop to zero and your car will catch on fire. So don't touch that horn. To take a quick tour of the mad skills, copy the main.scm file to the appropriate directory and start a new game. Get in the Admiral and head North towards the Malibu Club. You'll notice at once that you have a speedometer and randomized fuel gauge. If you step out of the car, these disappear. If you get in a new car, the fuel is randomized again; if you get in the same car, the fuel stays the same. It works by storing your old car when you exit, and then comparing its xpos, ypos, and health upon re-entering a car. If they are different, it recognizes the new car and regenerates the fuel values. This code is a little bit rough, but it's functional. I do intend to clean it up soon. If you don't hold the enter-car key while entering, it may not put the gauge up -- this is an easy fix I just haven't done yet. At the moment, when you run out of fuel, your car will catch fire. I hope to disable it more accurately later. Fuel levels are weighted towards the top, by the way, and I'm planning on making fuel consumption vary by car type and causing it to leak when the car is damaged too much. You may have noticed by now that you can be picked up for speeding, but you may not have. Every so often, it code runs a random check to see if you were caught while speeding. I plan to generate actual cops to chase you, rather than simply updating the wanted level, and I am going to play the "10-4, we have a drunk driver" wav (PHIL_2" or "_25", I think). So far I haven't had any luck playing wavs, but I've only worked on this for 12 hours or so. By the way, the car number reporting you is randomly generated each time. Now that you've played with that for a while, go into the Malibu and approach the bar. There is a pickup there. Since I started you with money, there is no need to kill anybody for your drinks. Go up and have a few. Each one (up to will increasingly impair your controls and display (using the Phil mission drunk opcodes). After 8, they continue to count up. At 23, you get liver poisoning and start bleeding. Your health will sap at the rate of one per second. There is no cure yet, but I plan to heal you on entering an ambulance or picking up health, in the future. Now, go back outside and get in your car. Drive around for a while. You may notice that you're getting less impaired, if you drive around long enough. Each drink takes one real minute (one hour in-game) to wear off, just like real life. You may also notice that you're getting a wanted level. It varies with how drunk you are: at three drinks, one star, at five drinks, two stars, and at eight or more, three stars. I capped it there, because while you might see undercover cops coming after a drunk driver, you'll never see a SWAT team or National Guard unit on that bust. You may not notice this, though, because there is a 5% chance every 30 seconds. That means, on average, you can drive drunk for ten minutes (long enough to sober up!) before you get caught. So you probably won't get caught, although you might. I felt this was realistic. I also unlocked Hyman Condos from the begining and put a Hunter in Ocean Beach. Nothing earth-shattering, but it's nice to have available when you're screwing around. You can save your game at the hangar on the docks or in the airport by the helipad. Hyman Condo's helipad saves your helicopters, and so does the airport one. Your boats are saved in the docks hangar. There is a glitch in the game code that assumes your garages are enclosed, so it doesn't display saved vehicles until you enter the space. Otherwise it works fine. Also, go to the Lovefist building. There's a save pickup on the steps: when you grab it, you teleport to the top of the building, where the once-empty helipad has a Maverick. I added this to replace the one I removed from Hyman Condos early on, and the code is pretty bad. If I were to rewrite that, which I will at some point, I would use an in-sphere check rather than a pickup, raise the zpos so you don't restart embedded in concrete, and fade it properly. Oh yes, to sober up any time, hit the dodo up/dodo down keys. This is some remaining debug code as well. Everything else is stock code, so most of the game is still locked. You can play a game normally if you're so inclined. By the way, how about poison darts in MTA? Replace one gun with a tranq. rifle and when you hit the other player with it, trigger some drunk code on the other console... my pick would be the shitty sniper rifle, because it takes a long time to reload, like a real tranq. rifle, and could be used strategically from a distance.

Are you still looking for somebody?

Instead of a "sky box," you should make "dead" players roam around as invisible or semitransparent ghosts. Maybe, like in Mario Kart 64, they can still hurt other players by running into them or something...

That would be a great mod, but we don't need Vice City to do it. You could easily make the police a third team in MTA on GTA3, and have it follow these rules. I'd like to see more "teams" like that -- maybe fire and paramedic teams that, you know, put out fires and provide aid to the wounded. If the net code was tight enough to support a hundred players or so, you could get complex, real-time societies forming in the game. Massively multiplayer GTA roleplaying... that'd be hot.