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if you do buy a R9500, and want to mod it to a R9700, there is only 1 type of R9500 that will allow it. The first wave of Radeon 9500's had R9700 PCB, with severed pipelines, so it basically run far less than the 9700, but had the capability of running all pipelines. Look for the layout of the card, mem blocks being in a 'L' shape is a give away, also, it needs to be the NON PRO version. anything else is not moddable. we tried this mod at net-machines.com, but to no avail. even if you have a moddable card, chances are the severed pipelines have been damaged and are unusable. the R9700 is a great card to run GTA3. The R9500, @ default clock speeds runs almost the same as the Ti4200, overclocked, the Ti4200 beats it quite nicely. In my opinion, it is far better to go nVidia rather than ATI, based on reliability and driver support, but thats my opinion

Just for the record.... The Ti4800SE is basically a Ti4400 @ 8x, with a few extra trimmings. The Ti4800 NON-SE has the Ti4600 speed mem, faster mem/core clock and AGP 8x. There is a Ti4200SE, which has 8x, but is not worth the extra £30($40-50) extra when the Ti4800 is within the price range. all main distributors have dropped the Ti4400/4600 to sell the Ti4800 and Ti4800SE. so kids, remember, if it has 'SE' in the name, stay well clear. The Ti4800 *NON SE* is an awesome card.

and er.... Intel own AMD. Get a Granite Bay setup, DDR400, massively high benchmark scores. NForce is basically AMD's answer to Granite Bay, which performs nowhere near as good as Granite Bay. Yes, the price difference is rather large, but, Intel systems are always better. Nothing wrong with a good AMD setup, altho, to get anywhere near Intel performance, your gonna have to fork out almost as much. I work for a performance PC company, we build and stress test all our systems, if anyone is in need of a high performance, cheap ass system, overclock-ready, just let me know Also, if you intend on playing games on anything higher than 800x600, a high end graphics card is a must. Ti4200 is a nicely priced, high performance card. benchmarked against other cards in its price range, it comes out top. Beating the R9500PRO even. Note: my Ti4200 is overclocked all shapes, perhaps thats why it ownz

Epox 8K3A (NB Modded) CAK38 II HSF AMD Athlon XP 1600+ @ 1771~MHz (168*10.5) (AGOIA 'Y') 256MB PC2700 DDR333 GeForce Ti4200 @ (320/640) Western Digital WD600 7200RPM 60GB LG Studioworks 575N 15" Gameboy Style Monitor 3 x Delta 80MM Fan 12,086 3DMark's (2001SE) 3000 3DMark's (2003) GTA3 Constant 100 - 150 FPS (1280x1024x32) My previous Rig was a Kettle.

you left a '3' out in there, and '\|' does not make a good 'Y'

lag is packet loss, inability for client to recieve from server, and vixe versa. the netocde schedules packet sends, and regulates what packets should be sent and when, plus the conent. the sending and recieving of these packets are based solely on the netcode, and how it sends and recieves. when the netcode attempts sending this huge amount of data, there will obviously be packet loss to players on low end connections as the netcode is attempting to send more than the client can recieve. this will be the case, even for high end connections. andd as i have said already, many times, there wont be a way to synchronize everything, not without severe lag :P:P which is precicely what lag is, the client waiting for packets to be recieved, and freezing, lag

ezer is a bit.... desperate E-Z'r looks better

being a fellow VB coder, i was wondering if i could possibly see the project code, for education purposes only of course. perhaps an early version showing the basic functions of it, and perhaps contribute something to the development of the project. it might be a good idea to set up a thread of sample code, and maybe get some input from other coders. it can be very beneficial getting extra minds onto a project. external contributions are usually helpful.

and let us know what your computer science teacher has to contribute

and sending packets 'faster' wont make much of a difference on a low end connection, not when theres so much to be sent on sucha limited rate.

lag is obviously based on efficient netcode. a good example being Tibia ( http://www.tibia.de ). when that was first released, the netcode was awful. the server load was very low and way too much data was being sent and recieved. over the years, the code was optimized to send only certain integers and values at certain times, complex timer systems and truncated data made the load a lot less, thus the game lagged a lot less and load could be increased. this whole concept is basically the same as the deus ex multiplayer discussion, which resulted in the deus ex multiplayer patch being deprived of much, in the form of the unreal basec multiplayer system, as they are the same engine. being that GTA3 uses a unique engine, which is not built for multiplayer usage, it was obviously too much for the GTA3 programmers to code, and WILL be too much for a wins0ck system to handle. there will have to be some serious downgrading of game resources for it to work, and relistically it will suck. tbh. removal of all the extra shit, eg cars and peds will just be shit. as for the grid system, GTA3 pretty much operates on a similar concept. the data will still have to be sent and recieved, its just a slightly different way of calculating entity positions. plus it would be extra coding for the GTA3MTA team, which will result in more delayed release times

proficient in VB/B*, some C/C++ and much TCP/IP physics. and yes, VB is a very limited language to program something so vast. perhaps you should recruit some C gurus, #C++ on EFNET

if it was really that easy, send positions and display etc, then all games would only require minimal bandwidth. it just isnt that simple, look at a 56k ping on counterstrike. lowend graphics, relatively small levels and small max player amounts, and some 56kers find it impossible to play. PLUS CS netcode is 'optimized' all shapes. take into account, this i sbeing programmed in VB, plus, the HUGE level size and, if pedestrians are to be left out, the lack of enteties occupying the area, the max players for mta would have to be 32+. Ever played americas army on a 512k line ? ping can reach 100+ on the fastest of 32 player servers. note: americas army netcode is also professionally programmed and optimized. VB comes with many limitations, especially in this area.

There is much much more to consider than just position and orientation. For Example -100 Cars- 100 x Positions 100 x Amount of Damage to Each 100 x Damage Decals/Damage texture positons 100 x State Changes (on client-side) That is being sent every second, plus, if a car gets destroyed, it would have to be replaced etc. And, that information is going to be sent to every connected client continually. And the size of the map, 100 cars is nothing by comparison. Pedestrians also, being a lot more of them would take the same amount of data being sent. Plus Debris/powerups and other player health/coordinates, you can see why most online games are so simple.

The *ONLY* way the game can be synchronized, both pedestrians and traffic is to have the host constantly sending out the coordinates of every model rendered to every client connected, there is no 2 ways about it. This is why the Multiplayer extra was originally left out, and also why you never see this in any other game. The amount of information to be sent is just too great, the only hope would be a LAN solution. Allow me to illustrate. ................ [CLIENT]................ .......................|..................... [CLIENT] - [sERVER] - [CLIENT] .......................|..................... ................[CLIENT]................ The server would control the positions of everything on the map, from cars and pedestrians, to debris and police. To allow free flowing gameplay, with pedestrians and traffic following the exact same route on each system, the information would have to be sent 4 ways (assuming there are 4 people connected). The bare information itself it just huge, sending it between 2 systems would be far too big, sending it between 4, thats quite a large upstream rate. Plus, each client has to send the same information back, EG Client1 hits a car, causing it to swirve off the road and hit 3 pedestrians, then topple on its roof and explode killing another 4 pedestrians and setting 2 cars on fire. That information must be sent first to the server so the changes can be made, then resent to all the clients connected. Considering the speed of which all that can happen, that, bundled with the positions of everything on the map, is a lot of data. With regards to randomize 'seed', if by that, you mean the server and client each follow a ruleset where the pedestrians and cars all follow a set of instructions, predefined, what happens when client1 hits a car, sets it off the ruleset. That car for all the other clients would have to follow the ruleset, thus breaking the snychronization. The only way around it would be to send the coordinates of the changed position, which would start off a chain of coordinates having to be sent, thus resulting in the masssive amount of data being sent, there is no way around constant packets of huge data being sent. It is more than likely, the programmers will remove all pedestrians and most traffic, and have a small amount of synchronized AI to give the game a level of realism. Or alternatively, remove all AI and have plain deathmatch mode, or simplify the map, perhaps have a custom map built which would have to be a lot smaller. All this would take away the realism of GTA3 which would make the multiplayer mod as addictive as single player mode. The truth of the matter is, there is no real way to do it without sending data of this magnitude. One day, when high-end broadband internet becomes standard, and we all sit at home on our T3 lines piped directly into our rooms, perhaps this will become a reality. For now, we must settle for the simple CLIENT vs CLIENT method, with the slight possibility of some realistic AI, and LAN of course

It would be virtually impossible to code synchronized pedestrians AND cars without severe lag (for net gaming anyway). The possibility of synchronized LAN gaming exists, altho it is a lot of data to be sent back and forth considering the size of the map and the amount of cars and pedestrians in it. But, it seems only pedestrians and cars within a certain distance of where you are on the map are rendered, perhaps that could be used to decrease the amount of information sent some how, by maybe only sending back and forth the data regarding the models within a certain radius of the players location. I have done some TCP/IP programming before and i know how difficult/repetative it can get, which usually results in the project being discontinued due to sheer boredom. I hope of course, this wont be the case here . So remember, when your ratting the poor programmers ass as to the release date of the next version, just think to yourself the amount of work required to, effectively, 'recode' a game in a way which the original makers of GTA3 failed to do, and implement a feature left out for reasons of obvious difficulty. Your prayers are being answered, the least you can do is have a little patience