orappa

There were a couple of peds knocking about but they weren't synced and had presumably been left in there by mistake.

Nah, they said that they'd make a Blue version for GTA3 if there was sufficient demand for it.

Yeah, it's nothing to worry about. The MTA site's been hacked on several occasions.

I found an interesting article yesterday. It details several of the methods of reducing lag in multiplayer games (towards the bottom of the page). It's written by a guy who works at Raven Software (Soldier of Fortune, Jedi Knight, Quake 4). http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articl ... le1138.asp But in relation to NPCs, the strain is not only in bandwidth but also in processing power. Also, the server does not run GTA so you would not be able to use GTA's pedestrian routines but would have to write your own.

I'm sure gas tanks will be synced at some point, although it's unknown whether that will be in the first release of MTA:SA or not. It's definitely a good balancing feature though. I could have lots of fun with a sniper rifle

Yeah, but you can just shoot out their tires so that they can't drive so well and then aim for the gas tank. Alternatively, if you're a good shot and there's not too much lag, you could aim straight for the gas tank to start with.

Excuse me? What are you insinuating? GTAT is also making an SA version but I doubt they are responsible either.

Thank God. Also, did you find that after a while you couldn't spawn cars?

That's correct

I remember in Tribes 2 when you'd have to queue to use an inventory station or the vehicle pad. I'd get out my plasma gun and fire into the middle of everyone, blast them out of the way and get to the front of the queue I only tended to do that on a LAN though, as I preferred doing it to people that I knew.

You could in theory destroy the actor when they enter the plane and recreate them when they exit, thus not needing to place the actor in a seat. I believe this is how the bus works.

And various other ones:

Not necessarily.

Teams such as who exactly? SA-MP have said they'll release a VC version... after their SA version. The same goes for GTAT. Who's left?

I'm sure someone will try to create synced NPC characters, and it will be interesting to see how successful they are.

Yeah, sometimes you can fire a rocket at a teammate to blast them to safety if friendly fire is disabled, which can be useful at times.

1. You don't know how long SA will take to be released; it could be just around the corner. 2. There is heated competition in the SA multiplayer field with 4 teams battling it out (although one is 2 player only). There is also high demand for SA multiplayer which means that the team should put their resources into whatever people want the most (allocative efficiency). If they were to put more resources into 0.5.5, this may affect the progress of MTA:SA. 3. MTA is losing players, true, but it's amazing how many old faces I see when they make a new news post about MTA:SA. I don't think losing GTA3/VC players will affect the player counts for MTA:SA much.

Definitely not in the initial release. In future releases, possibly (don't hold your breath).

I must admit that it was fun to drive around without traffic getting in my way.

It's good to see that you saw sense and purchased the retail version.

We cannot offer support for users with illegal versions of the game. Also, please don't post the same topic multiple times in different locations.

How is that proof?

Are you sure it's not the fact that the server page might not have been updated to include the addition of new players? I'm not sure how often it updates.

I didn't say they were small bugs. I said they were simple bugs - i.e. (relatively) simple to fix. They're actually quite large bugs. I've never said GTAT or SA-MP were making empty promises, although I have mentioned that gameplay is the only way to rate each mod against its competitors, and not by screenshots or videos. I'm not moaning about "a few bugs". I'm complaining about the fact that these bugs are significant. For some reason Draco doesn't seem to see the crashes to desktop with no message telling the user what went wrong as a bug.

Yes but a lot of people can't play it. That's the problem. Most applications go through alpha testing before reaching the beta stage in order to iron out simple bugs like the CTD when another player has the same name as you. It would not be difficult to display a message informing the player instead of just crashing.