orappa

This could be quote of the year (smithers goes away to add it into his gtaforums signature). Its completely wrong, helping people has EVERYTHING to do with respect. Its not something that you can debate. Its what respect is all about, you help people, and by helping them, you gain respect. I'm not sure if I agree with the statement that helping has "EVERYTHING" to do with respect. Respect generally means "held in high regard" - it is entirely possible to regard others highly without them doing something for you first. I respect people I've never met before because I can tell a lot about them just by looking at them. They don't need to help me (in fact, I much prefer doing things by myself) for me to respect them. I do understand where your argument is coming from, but to say it is entirely based on how you help others is false.

Maybe so, but it's near identical in the eyes of the user.

I think the main problem is that a number of people on these forums don't take Stanton seriously, and it is some people's opinion (not mine) that he couldn't organise a piss-up at a brewery. This makes it difficult to take his project seriously. From what I've seen, VMP looks to be a contender with MTA (whether or not serious competition can only be discovered from a playtest). My advice to you would be to work hard (but don't rush it) to get a release ASAP so that people can actually play it and judge it as a game rather than judging it by the team behind it.

Instagib generally relies on reflex actions. Tension is added by the fact that the guns take ages to reload ready for the next shot, so if you miss, your life expectancy is decreased significantly The minigun doesn't have this, and it's basically a n00b "press the trigger and wave it back and forth" type weapon requiring little accuracy.

Unfortunately, there is no formal release date ("when it's done") - not even the devs know when it's coming out (well, not the exact date anyway).

You said earlier that MTAMA receives more info from 0.4, and I reckon it should be possible for it to receive how a player was killed (i.e. by which weapon). This could be useful for stats scripts and scripts that kick a player if he heli-kills too many times (I think the FMJ server has a "kick on repeated heli-kill" policy if I remember rightly).

Yep, that's what I found, so I bought a book off eBay which was pretty good. It's SAMS Teach Yourself Visual C++ 6 in 21 Days by Davis Chapman and Jeff Heaton. It is dedicated to Win32, but it also has a cmd section at the back (strangely command line programs compiled with VC++ only work on Windows systems, which seems a little pointless to me).

Not even:

I believe that Counter-Strike works out where players should be so that it can accomodate for lost or delayed packets. Cheaters seem drawn to the official servers, but there are plenty of other servers available.

There will, as always, be enhancements to the anti-cheat mechanism. However, the cheaters will work on counter-measures, so whether these new features reduce cheaters remains to be seen. At any rate, the new spectator mode will give admins greater power when it comes to ascertaining whether someone is cheating.

0.1 had no weapons and cars, 0.2 was crappy and then he jumped from 0.3 to 0.5 (cause there was "loads" of improvement) Do you think it's a "clever" marketing strategy so that people think that GTAT is more advanced than MTA because it has a higher version number? (By "people", I mean "idiots", of course)

I thought that the idea with 0.4 was to integrate GTA 3 and VC into a single client.

Yeah, I love they way they think that we actually care... cracks me up every time 9 times out of 10 I'm glad to be rid of them.

I quote: As you stated, i.e. the 2nd release will have 2 gta3 maps, and the 3rd all three. The purpose of this method is that we can release 0.4 so you can play it without spending as much time on it as we would have to for all three islands. It also gives us a bit more time to add new functions, e.g. the 2nd release will have some new functions, which will work on both maps...eAi Each version of 0.4 is an upgrade from the last (as far as I understand), so Vice City would be subjected to the smoothness too.

Yeah, C++ offers you more control over individual aspects. Unfortunately, this means that you have to write multiple code lines in order to do simple things, hence it's harder.

He didn't actually mention cheating - he just said modding. But no, it's not best to mod MTA because it can cause all sorts of problems such as lagging other players. It is best to wait for them to be officially supported.

Yeah, the problem with C++ is that you have to add loads of headers in order to get it to do simple things. It's the kind of thing that you need to spend a weekend on, just seeing what kind of stuff is available by default. For example, some people would suggest using instead of - I'm not quite sure why (I am by no means an expert on C++).

Yeah, but I found that after a while you get to a point where you're using VB to its limits and trying to do things that are impossible or that VB doesn't do very well.

He said he wanted a demo of VB. VB's not like C++ - you do not need to (manually) compile the program in order to run it, as VB has built-in functions to do that. Hmm... crap explanation, but I know what I mean. And regarding your second point, that is entirely false. C++ and BASIC are not owned by anyone, so anyone can make compilers for them. Visual Basic and Visual C++ however are trademarks of Microsoft.

Progress seems to be pretty fast - what sort of release time frame are you looking at? (Note that I said "time frame" and not "release date")

There aren't any demos for VB. However, there was a SAMS Publishing VB book that had a special version with it, which was fully functional except that you couldn't compile to an EXE. I've forgotten what the book was called though. Anyway, here is the official site: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/ Oh, and after clicking that link, I noticed that a free version of VB.NET is available, but you have to meet certain criteria in order to qualify. Edit: Oh, btw, it's called "Visual Basic" not "Visual Basics". You wouldn't believe how many people make that mistake. "Basic" doesn't mean simple - it's an acronym for "Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code". It should be written "BASIC", but for some reason, Microsoft dropped the capital letters.

Shouldn't this thread be locked or renamed seeing that MTA 0.4 is past the major feature-adding stage?

What I like best about MTA is its pick-up-and-play gameplay. Loads of people are going to be put off if they have to give out personal details when it's not entirely necessary.

If he's at rr.com, surely a wildcard IP ban would stop him just as well as your method?

I can't imagine an explanation that will get them off the hook. I mean, how do you "accidentally" get mixed up between your competitors screenshots and your own?