Gadfly

really wtf is going thru Dracos mind. I know its his mod and he can do whtever he wants. But by delaying any release for so long he has just given himself a really bad name. People realize that there are bugs and this is beta. If he cares to keep people interested he should release something. Maybe it wont have all the features, but it will have some. There is only so long that you can keep yanking peoples chains. Seriously can ANYONE give a reason why he has not released ANYTHING in what over 6 months? No one plays .3b. His radical jump to .5 (where is .4?) is really overkill. Most software projects with any following release often with incremental feature expansions. As it is now the public perceptopn of Draco is he is a braggart that cant deliver. I know a few of you have seen some of his stuff, and say its decent. But that does not address what I am talking about. Its about public perception. Every time I am in a game and see someone mention gtat everyone just laughs. Why cant he put out .5 ALPHA and if there are some features that are totally broken just disable them. I am asking WHY he is not. If anyone knows WHY or has an Idea WHY, then please answer. What I am not looking for is "Its his project and he can do what he wants". That is totally obvious. Yes he can do whatever the hell he wants. But WHY is he willing to get such a bad name for himself, by not releasing something before his .5 is tested and complete?

ASE is one of the coolest programs out there. Even though I am an extreme cheapskate I even registered it. I have only bought 2 shareware apps ever. ASE and UltraEdit. Of course I did not have to, but I wanted to reward the authors for their great work. Also since I use UltraEdit for developing it has MORE than paid for itself 100 times over. Start messing with the filters.txt file and writing your own custom filters. You will really love the program. You can create VERY custom settings. Gamespy is about the biggest piece of poo out there. Bloated any non usuable. Sure we can all fireup VB and write some program to launch this, but why? Are you allowing for all the filtering? Are you allowing for it to find new servers automatically? What are your gripes with ASE, maybe you have something misconfigured.

I heard 2 other people where saying they had the same problem. I haven't got a chance to try mta lately as I am back on dialup .

ok, i HOPE u were joking or being sarcastic. 1st, i DOUBT u can ban my macaddress but if u can that would be best. 2nd, if 1st is false, then, to ban people who are dhcp happny, is to ban their entire isp. wat about the others? TFB. it is IMPOSSIBLE to ban by "HARDDRIFE SERIALNUMBER" from the server. IMPOSSIBLE. unless the client sends that info, which would conflict with privacy freaks. i know not of another way of banning a person using DHCP powers other than banning by ISP Um obtaining someones MAC address via the client is a trivial matter, sending it to the server is a trivial matter, and banning by it is also trivial. If privacy issues are a concern just run it through an md5 hash and ban the hash result.

nuff said Given that many people here don't speak english as their primary language, I would not automatically assume anything based on how someone spells a word. If english is your primary language, how well do you spell in say german or hungarian?

With dhcp and dialup it really makes no sense to ban by ip. It is better to ban by mac address. Just have the client send the mac address to the server when you connect and check if its a banned one.

They sell tools to remove scratches from CDs. I had a scratch in my Visual Studio cds and I was freaking out but tried one of those tools and then it installed fine. You can find then at big computer stores or music stores.

#1 I never said Dracoblue was faking anything. #2 If you know ANYTHING about programming you would clearly know there is a HUGE difference between having an idea about how to implement something, and actually implementing it in an ideal fashion. Obviously he thinks he has a way to implement it. I am sure the MTA team do as well. The difference is the MTA team understand the difference between theory and practice. Without having at least 96 beta testers its all theory. He cannot test the stability of 96 players or how much of a hit on the bandwidth and other server resources it will take. He doesnt even have close to the number of beta testers to test these features. Really WTF is the point to developing a feature you have no hope to test before you release it? The very point to BETA testing is that not everything goes as planned. It is not bashing Dracoblues ability to code that is the issue. All code needs BETA testing, I dont care who you are. To claim that a dozen or 2 dozen or even 3 dozen people can test the ability to run a 96 player server is riddiculous. Unless Dracoblue amazingly gets 96 beta testers with enough time to truely test this feature, he cannot make any claims as to whether or not this feature is stable or even works at all. I cannot see how his requests for you to model something or edit some map has anything to do with this.

The thing is when draco makes claims like he will have 96 players working, and he has like a dozen beta testers max people are going to be skeptical. How can he impliment, test, debug, and optimize a feature he has NO WAY of testing. He basically brags about how he can do this and that, but when it comes down to it, he has nothing to show. He then comes here and starts accusing the devs of doing things like locking out his speedo, and he starts to wear on peoples nerves.

Notice I did not log onto his site and complain to him at his lack of a viable product. My comments were in reaction to him coming here and basically accusing the MTAVC devs of purposely locking out his speedometer. Even after they told him they were not doing it on purpose he continued to harrass them. He also brings alot of problems on himself when he does things like promise 96 player support on the next version when he only has like a dozen beta testers max. HTF can he test, debug, and optimize a 96 player server with 12 beta testers? If he constantly is claiming how his MOD is going to be so much better than other MODs (MP) then he opens up the whole can of worms as to people being a little skeptical. Then it doesnt help when he comes in here and fires off his mouth about how MTAVC are pulling dirty tricks on him, that they CLEARLY are not.

Dracoblue Why dont you spend your time getting your gtat .5 out instead of worrying about if your speedometer works in MTA2 ? I have wanted to test out your GTAT but apparently not a single server is out there running it. All I can assume is that it must be a pretty lousy mod if not one person is willing to put up a server. When I asked about it in the forums there, all I got was everyone was waiting til .5, and BTW wtf happend to .4? Are you doing version inflation?

Are you sure the mta.scm in the data folder and the MTAClient are both the current version? Make sure that ASE is pointing at the new MTAClient not the old one.

I think Quake 3 and other ID games allowed that. Maybe CS too? It just ties up slots were people could be playing.

Every time ive tried to test GTAT there has never been any servers up. I cannot say I have tested the game firsthand, however if there are no servrs up it tells me it must such, as look at how many servers for MTA exist.

I could write something like this if the MTA team would not be against it, I know spam protection exists, but they may have some other reason they dont want it and I would abide by their wishes.

This feature already exists. Its a server side setting, I think you can only say 2 lines of text per second by default then you get booted and possibly banned,

ADFs are already really mp3s. All that has been done is they XORed x22 to every byte. It can be done or undone with a few lines of code. It was interested in finding the specs for ADF files but no one who knew described it anywhere that I could find. The first tip off is the ADF and the MP3 that contain the same data are the same EXACT size. That right there almost ensures its the result of some ORing. The odd thing is they just used the same value throughout the file, instead of using some real encryption algorithm. Well I am just describing the format in case anyone else was wondering. Basically to make a new station just concatinate the mp3s you want in the station, in the order you want into one big mp3. Then either write your own or use someone elses mp3 to ADF converter.

ssh.com makes available a non commercial verion of its client for free. I think it is alot nicer than PuTTY. ftp://ftp.ssh.com/pub/ssh/SSHSecureShel ... -3.2.9.exe

??? If you just bought it, go back and exchange it now. Be glad it started getting flakey on you when you could still return/exchange it.

You can replace one of the radio stations like FEVER with one of your own making. I just wrote a VERY BETA program that takes all the mp3s in a directory and combinds them and converts them to an ADF and if you replace an original radio station like FEVER it plays the new music instead. I found no documentation on the ADF format, but after looking at it for about 30 seconds, I found out how to convert them to mp3 and back. I have not followed the mod scene so I dont know why rockstar invented this adf format. Maybe out of copywrite conserns? It is a very very simple scheme they are using.

Well yes it is written in VB, but its mostly using windows API. Basically all it is doing is getting window handles to the error windows and auto clicking the right buttons. Then after it makes sure that gta-vc has closed it presses the Start Game button for you. All of that has to be done through the windows API as VB alone can't do much. I am going to be messing with this a bit this weekend, maybe if you want to help test the second version with some bug fixes and adding the ability to able to choose your keybinds that would be cool. Gadfly

What hitting the enter key does is just press the button in the unhandled exception and error dialogs. That is what this program automates. If I am not mistaken I think he was talking about even when he hits enter it still takes a while to unload the game.

Yeah that is what I meant. I dont know why I said trainer. Heh. I think there may a link here. If you can find out what is causing that delay, let me know. when it is taking a long time to return to the desktop, can you still alt + tab to the desktop? Can you see VC in the task list? Is the start button enabled? If so what happens if you click it? Thanks Gadfly

Hmm, By this do you mean that without the trainer it takes a long time to go back to the desktop? I ask because my game does that occassionally, and like I said I occassionally have that chatbug/mapbug and it is always on the occasion when it takes a long time for MTA to close.

Hmm, I will have to work on this a bit over the weekend. And try to find out why this bug affects some, but not others. There are different ways to simulate mouse clicks so I may try a couple different ways. I may just rewrite it from scratch. Thanks for the bug info. Gadfly