Nutz

What standard set of rules should we use for gang wars in GTA3? The most significant difference in gangplay from VC is the auto-respawning in a semi-random location. Here are a couple ways to deal with that: - Exit game when you die and monitor the chat in the client. - Assign a pre-defined gathering area for people out of play. You must go directly there and not go near active fighting. you must not hurt or kill anyone while out of play. The safe area should be chosen for each round to keep it away from the action.\ - allow players to return to play immediately and use a fixed time limit to end the round. Winner is determined by cumulative kills for the team or some other formula like kill to death ratio. In this scenario kills outside of a defined theater should be disallowed to prevent spawnwar or disorganized chaos from ensuing. Careful consideration should be given to the allowance of vehicle kills because they are too easy in GTA3. Personally I think they should be allowed because, well, it's a part of the game! These are the rules I would like to use in a GTA3 gangwar: - All weapons and kill types are allowed, including Vehicle and Dodo - Teams may gather/purchase weapons before the round begins. There may be a time limit for pre-round gathering. - When you are killed, immediately exit the game (escape->quit game) and monitor the mta client chat until the end of round ( we should probably do this for VC too just to reduce crashes) - Fighting is limited to a well defined play area with precise boundaries. The play area sholud be large enough to offer some minor mobility. - 2 or three rounds are played, attack/defend and ffa if the first two are tied. - Defending team must be within the defined play area at all times once the round starts. - FFA round begins with both teams at chosen 'bases' and ready before Go is mutually called.

It appears that a fully loaded 26 player server uses 14 Megabits of outgoing bandwidth. That's about 560kbits/player or about 3 times what 0.3 used. This also means that players with 512K dsl or less are going to have packet loss on such a server. It also means you will see very few if any 26 player servers.

It varies geometrically by number of users but a maxed out 26 player server sends 4-6 Megabits per second depending on the players computers and network.

Well, after reading the stuff on planetgrandtheftauto.com, that map couldn't possibly be of the real game

Has anyone noticed the similarity of the "hydraulics" convertable with the red car icon in the supposedly made-up map: http://www.kl.net/gtasa/f8f89844.jpg.orig-c.jpg It looks like the same car. As I said before, I believe that map is real, taken from the forthcoming strategy guide. Those who said the map is too small, look at the size of the giant ships, also don't be mislead by the width of the major roads. There are many small side streets and alleys that don't show up well in that scan. See the previous game guides where the islands for gta3 and vc look smaller than the feel in the game. If so, what would the hydraulic car icon mean? My guess is some kind of challenge like the unique stunts. The one at the airport is a good giveaway. Why else would you have a car icon between two runways? So if this is a map of "challenge" icons, what do the other icons represent? - The 3 yellowish icons look kind of like jet packs! Their placement at bridges/fault lines suggests some kind of challenge. The Jetpacks probably only run for 20 seconds or so like the one at the olympics. - The mostly black icons could be "drive-by" challenges. They are situated only in residential areas. It kind of looks like someone shooting from a sunroof like in the screenshot. - The money icons? Who knows. Probably not ATM's due to placement, but keeping with the challenge maybe they are related to drugs somehow? - the "gun" icons. There are three of these, each on separate land masses. Target challenge? Ammunation? - the blue and yellow icon on the "Alcatraz" island. ???

Can you add the mime-type for .wmv to the webserver so non IE browsers like mozilla and safari will recognize it and prompt for save-as? Right now it's serving it as text/plain I think (which IE ignores incorrectly).

Is that an FBI character in the VC shots? Spawning with MP5? AWESOME!!!! Also, I saw the cheetah has the bubble light (nice!)

Some weapons are much more effective than others. If you choose not to use them, then you had better have good defense. I try to use a variety of weapons to keep things interesting, but if I am in a Must Kill situation I reach for the stubby. I'm sure this will change if aiming is fixed in the next version.

Yes. It's time to learn something new guys.

The m60 was easier to handle in 0.2 but 0.3 simply requires a differnt technique. The M60 is still a very potent weapon at long range. Of course dropping the initial M60 ammo to 75 really hurts until you pick up 900 rounds in the M60 ammo drop glitch.

Thank you! Hopefully this includes limiting nicks to a strict set of characters on the server. You could even put the acceptable character list in the config file and load it as the check string. Then use something like: (eidt: sorry the formatting is messed up by forum) int checkNick(char *validchars, char *nick) { // returns 1 if any character in nick is not found // in validchars, 0 if all characters in nick are found int i; char *c; c=nick; for (i=0; i < strlen(nick) i++) { if (strchr(validchars, *c) == NULL) { return(1); } else { c++; } } return(0); } Another nice feature would be to implement the 10 second rejoin delay on the server instead of client (no ip can rejoin unless 10 seconds has elapsed since last JOIN (not exit).

That depends, if the high ping is a side effect of excessive packet loss then all the aim in the world won't help. If it is simply distance related latency (AU-USA is 400+) then aiming ahead will work fine.

I switched to the staticly linked server that MrBump sent me and logging has not failed yet.

A little more info... the (null) user only shows up in the mtma view. That may not be an actual person joining and mey not be related to the logging stopping.

A user with certain unknown characters has been joining. Their username appears to be null. They only show up on the admin client. The server logfile does not show them joining and stops all logging from that point on until the mta server process is restarted. This is on FreeBSD 5.2 (which otherwise works great!) Has anyone else seen this?

My initial preference is for #2 with all three islands. Teleports aren't a problem but I wonder about using a dodo to access other areas. What is the concequence of that? If #2 means no Dodo, then I'd strongly support #1.

Some important considerations: First person aim does not work. Auto-aim does not work Use "standard controls". If you're like me and you use a gamepad (like the ps2), you proabaly set the controls to "classic mode" to make them like the ps2. Classic controls do work as long as you don't use first person view/aim. However you cannot aim up or down, and rotating left/right is very slow. Standard controls allows fast up/down/left/right aim but will require some gamepad remapping to make it effieient. I have also found that the mouse gives the best aim control as opposed to keys or analog gamepad sticks. I currently use a Logitech gamepad with analog sticks and a mouse for fine aim control when necessary.

I used a PS/2 adaptor and gamepad until the adaptor broke. I couldn't find another adaptor so I bought a logitech USB gamepad with analog sticks. The Logitech is almost identical to a genuine PS/2 gamepad and works great. There is no substitute for the analog sticks for running and flying.

Or you could try the libraries from here: http://kl.net/mta

Installing gcc 3.x will indeed fix this problem. gcc 3.x is a much better compiler than 2.96 anyway. MTA is doing you a huge favor if they get you to upgrade from 2.96.

How about mta.ini in \windows? Did you delete that before installing 0.3?

Does anyone with this problem have more than one mta_dll.dll on their system? That 's the only thing I can think of that would cause this. I know when I had mta 0.2 and 0.2.2 on my system it was usin the old dll and that caused all kinds of craashes. Do a find->files or folders-> mta_dll.dll and see what you have. I started with a clean vc install and used the .zip unzipped to the vc dir and it worked fine.

While you can't integrate something like PD into VC, there are things the server could do. Things it could monitor and kick/ban for: Excessive Altitude Altitude below sea level Excessive speed (averaged over several seconds to ignore warps) Illegal weapons health increase too soon after previous increase. The client could probably uplink info from handling.cfg and weapon.dat periodically to compare against authentic files. This info should be taken from memory locations used by gta and not by opening the files directly.

Playing on a server with more than 12 people on 56k is outright cheating. On a 26 user server you would have about 75% packet loss on the donwlink so you see fewer bullets and weapon changes. Lag is less of a factor. There is plenty of bandwitdh to uplink your position, it will just be delayed by about 1/4 sec. That how well people can aim at you but not how smooth your movements appear. There should be a bandwidth test for connecting clients to be sure they can support the maximum number of users on that server.