Nutz

Awesome! I'd put one or two at the airport and one in the median of the portland->staunton island bridge, on the portland side. That bridge makes a better runway than the airport. Plus it's convenient to portland and Staunton Island. I guess some of the roads could make decent runways without all the AI traffic, but nothing beats that bridge.

Will there be more than one Dodo spawn? We could have dogfights since recovering from a mid-air dodo colllision would be much harder than a helicopter. Also it would be nice for those of us who can fly the Dodo well, so one player doesn't hog the only one.

"High" ping by itself is not bad (unless its over 400ms). High ping can be a sign of packet loss which is the real problem. Packet loss means not all of the downlink from the server is getting through to the other player. When you shoot, that information is sent to the server and to all players. If the other player misses the packet that says your shooting, he won't see you shoot, and no damage occurs. Weapon changes are also sent through the server. If the other player doesn't get the packet from when you changed weapons (say from a fist), even if he gets your shooting signal you will just be boxing on his computer. Aim and movement are also affected by packet loss. This is the most common non-cheating problem with mta gameplay. Especially on servers with lots of users. With 26 users the downlink is ~20K/s or 200Kbit/s. Anyone on dialup will have significant packet loss. Internet/ISP congestion can make even broadband users have some packet loss. It is also possible to intentionally induce packet loss, even while keeping ping low. I hope noone is doing that, especially since part of the fun of the game is watching the lead fly. I'm sure the developers will trim the downlink bandwidth whenever practical. One idea would be to send updates less frequently for users that are far away from you. If you can't possibly be hit by a users weapons because they are far far away, why send that information to you? I also don't need to know another players position to within millimeters when they are a mile away. The server should have access to the xyz coordinates of each player to use in selecting which info to send to each player and how often.

Now that is true From what I've seen, the people that use Cudda world aren't competing, but they are more like just "haning out" together. Sor t of like a new game mode.

What does that mean? A server that advertises cheats are ok or a server without a proactive admin to kick people on a whim? A server based around cheating would be a server that encourages cheating. A poorly managed server might be a haven for cheaters but not based around cheating. Oh, ok. I haven't seen any of those in a while.

What does that mean? A server that advertises cheats are ok or a server without a proactive admin to kick people on a whim?

By definition, it's not cheating if it is permitted by the server admin. The developers may not like it, but games are often played by different rules than intended by the manufacturer. When players and admins agree on an alternate set of rules, following those rules cannot be considered cheating. It's really not a hard concept to grasp. Have you ever agreed to play Scrabble with a different set of rules than are on the box lid? Does that make you a cheater? Of course not.

Actually, playing on a stunt server with a bunch of Cudda world playersis *much* more stable than playing unmodded on any DM server, so I don't think map mods affect MTA stability at all. Handling.cfg mods dont seem to affect stability either. I can go for hours without any crashes in stunt mode. What affects MTA stability are trainers and scm file mods. Those have a huge effect on stability and is why DM crashes alot. CW is a HUGE improvement of the play value in stunt mode, which is the reason for its exploding popularity. I don't see what difference it would make good or bad in DM mode. Additional surfaces don't give you any more advantage than alt-tab.

Cudda World is a map mod for Vice City. You should only use it on servers that explicitly allow it (and there are several that do). Using it on othere servers may lead to confusion as you could appear to be floating to users that don't have the new surfaces. That said, it does enhance stunt mode alot. You can get it here:

This "utility" will be unnecessary once the "/ignore" function is available and there is a rigorous limit on acceptable username characters (so you dont' have to guess which high-bit characters are in the offending persons name). How about just a-z A-Z 0-9 .--=!@#$%^&*(){}[];/?<>,~

Well there had better be an "unofficial" gta-vc.exe with no-cd because there is no way anyone will play it with annoying and slow cdrom access. I own both games for pc and ps2 in case anyone cares.

I saw a bunch of them on a server the other night. Being cocky is part of the game but it looked like several of them were using perfect aim cheat and either excessive packet loss (600+ping) or reduced damage weapon.dat. At least most of them were killable.

I'd like to point out that chopper blades are pretty much the only way to kill a cheater or someone with excessive packet loss. Not to mention the fact that helicopter blades can kill in real life, so the add realism to a game with helicopters. Also, it is not hard at all to avoid them. MTA is a frickin war zone, you should be aware of your surroundings at all times!

Cool! Maybe I"ll download 0.1 just to see that. I think there are also some textures for the recording studio, but I don't think that was complete.

VC includes scenery (textures) for the auditorium Downtown where Love Fist has their concert. This inludes the stage (with pyro) and a cool backstage/loading dock area. The collision surfaces are on all the time but there is no building entry point to load the textures (or open door for that matter. This "hidden interior" would be a neat addition to single or multiplayer.

Another possibility is packet loss. Unlike lag, which can cause bad aim, packet loss means the other player never knows you fired your weapon. This appears to be a very common problem on servers with lots of users. With about 20 users on a server the downlink is about 15K bytes/sec. Anything slower than 128K dsl will have some packet loss. A 28.8 modem can only take 3K/sec, so you will loose 80% of the packets. Other network congestion (limited server bandwidth for example) can also cause dropped packets. I did some experiments using the FreeBSD dummynet driver and varying the packet loss on the downlink only. At 75% you see very few bullets yet the game is very playable. Other players movements are jumpier, but enough position data gets through to make it work quite well. If anything can be done to prioritize weapon fire packets on the downlink at the expense of position updates, that would help. Better yet, if the downlink contained information about nearby players much more frequently than distant players, you might be able to improve this effect and significantly reduce downlink bandwidth. Of course the greatest benefit for this would be on the server where the bandwidth grows exponentially with the number of users