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Dont get mad at the MTA Team

paul527

By paul527
in General MTA discussion

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paul527 Banger

paul527

Posted
Posted

i keep hearing people bitching about how they're waiting for a new realease of MTA...

...and some ppl get mad and insult the MTA team!!!

its wrong to insult them, and many dont realize that its hard work

if you dont beleive me look at this

How development works by ChrML:

I noticed some rather misguided posts in the previous blog entry, so I thought I'd post some thoughts about it. First I'm going to explain the concept of development so that the community has a greater understanding of how the development process works and why it is taking so long.

Making an application, especially a huge application like MTA: Blue, usually starts with laying out the framework - thinking through and discussing how things will be implemented and what's the best way of doing them. It's important that this part is done correctly as it can't be changed much without rewriting/modifying large parts of the code. Many projects promise too much at this stage.

After that stage, things are being built on top of the framework making the application actually do something. This is the largest part of the development process.

After most of this is done, the program will enter the testing stage. MTA: Blue was not entirely completed when it entered this stage, thus things were being added alongside the testing process. We have a bug/feature database where the testers add things they want fixed/added before release. Also if they're annoyed by certain things, they will add that to the list and we all agree whether we want it fixed or not. The testers do more than just testing though. They've gotten several jobs, like sorting models (13,400 I think) into lots of categories making it easier for level/race makers to find models and use them. They will also create races for the final release.

Keep in mind that when the final version of MTA: Blue is released, it's not just a multiplayer mod, but a whole SDK for GTA providing access to every single function of the GTA engine. For those of you who have experimented with SCM hooking mods and finding/editing memory locations for things like position and health, this is nothing like it. This isn't "memory hacking". Nor is it hooking an SCM and being limited to the rather small things you can do using it. We've spent lots of our (spare) time reverse engineering GTA's code and we're now able to use methods in all of GTA's significant internal classes. That's done through our game interface written mostly in Assembly.

Our SDK will consist of headers for accessing GTA and our Blue functionality through the game interface, that will provide access to classes reflecting any of GTA's internal classes. GTA's internal classes are hard to work with though, so we have an open-source set of classes wrapping up the game interface into a much easier to use level. All our code for this "race" mod and the editor is based on top of our open-source layer and our game layer.

For those of you thinking this is easy work for anyone knowing C++, it is not. We're not dealing much with common programming mistakes that any debugger can tell you exactly where they are and how to solve them. We're dealing with mistakes in how we call GTA's functions, where any wrong call at a wrong time will crash GTA. Often the debugger won't give us any indication as to what's causing it as it's not in our code. If we get a crash in GTA not originating from any of our code, we know it's us doing something wrong earlier in the frame causing it to crash later, but when we've got just over 130,000 lines in our project (yes! I've counted), tracing exactly what we did is hard in most cases. Our open-source classes are designed to be failsafe to not crash easily when being used by the mod logic code.

Luckily we don't have many crashes to solve, nor many bugs left. Of course, each time I say that, someone assumes I said "MTA will be released in a week". What's left is tying up lots of loose ends before the release and letting the QA team test a lot trying to break it. Those of you who have been in "real" projects with >100,000 lines of code and a large development team know what I'm talking about. Those of you making utilities in VB and GTA missions by downloading an SCM hook template and working from there do not. I've had enough of these "hi, I can program C++ and I've done lots of bigger projects in a month" people. First, they don't know how big our project is because they don't know the portability and the functionality of our code. I could analyze that sentence dividing it into parts saying what impression that gives me of the guy saying it, but I won't bother. It should be obvious to most people with common sense (the least common of all senses).

Last but not least, I hope our first release will keep you all busy until we get our Deathmatch release and SDK out and I hope that everyone throwing shit at us will realize they've made a mistake. Whenever you feel like saying something bad, think twice and know that there are other people spending their spare time working on something you get for free. Have a nice day :wink:

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=BDC=Kenny Crime Partner

=BDC=Kenny

Posted
Posted

They didn't "BUY" MTA, they bought GTA, but the team started from scratch, not Rockstar's source code so online GTA is just an optional mod which is completly free. We should thank the MTA team not swear/insult them, since they made this mod for the public to have fun and its free.

(Hmm, it seems that I have revieled myself as a "not so rich" person lol)

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