It's been very long, but now I'm back

[DiSaMe]

Hey folks

So, I joined this community back in 2008, when MTA SA DM DP1 was released. It was great. I played in servers. I scripted stuff. The scripting part is especially important here, because I was amazed to see what possibilities to customize the game MTA SA gives to the scripters, and that's what got me involved so much. It was by scripting on MTA that I got lots of coding experience. I had such a great time that 2008 was one of the most memorable years for me, because I can still remember the good moments, including my first time playing the non-race version (I played MTA SA Race in 2007, but only a little bit, and didn't think much of it) and my first attempts to script.

As time went by, I set goals for myself. I thought of making my own server with my own gamemode. I didn't just want it for my own gains, I wanted it for the good of MTA, too! I wanted to make use of MTA scripting possibilities, to let the greatness of MTA be known! However, as I still wasn't that good at scripting nor at setting goals (they were huge), I wasn't exactly being productive. I experimented a lot and learned a lot, but apart from that, it didn't really go anywhere. After a few years of playing around, I realized my goals weren't going to come true. I decided I just wanted to be useful to MTA community. That's when I made and released a few scripts, including Drawtag, Gravity gun and NPC traffic. Later I made my own server after all, with a gamemode very different from what I had originally planned. But I was too busy with crap in my life to continue working on it, so I had to end it. I didn't want to abandon MTA. All those dreams that never came true. But I didn't see any other way. I stopped playing and scripting on MTA. Eventually I drifted away and stopped visiting this forum altogether.

During the time I was away, I was just living life, but not really feeling like I was enjoying it. There were ups and downs. You know, everyone goes through different phases of life.

But now I feel bad about it. It wasn't necessarily my fault that I left, but it was my fault that I didn't come back for so long. Now that I finally did, it seems there have been people who were looking for me, but I don't even know if it's of any use to reply to messages I received 3 to 5 years ago. I'm regularly on YouTube though, but even there, often I didn't feel like replying to comments right away and forgot about them later. I'm feeling like a busta who ran away and left his homies when there was no reason to. I'm feeling like I have betrayed MTA because it gave me so much, but I didn't manage to benefit it as much as I thought it deserved.

Things have surely changed around here while I was gone. I see there are admins and moderators who weren't even on this forum when I left. And honestly, I don't remember many people in particular. I don't remember well who was and who wasn't here back in those days. I don't know if anyone here misses me. I'm so out of touch. Kinda sucks, doesn't it? After wandering for years, I'm finally back home, but I'm not even sure if it's still the same home that I've been missing because I don't even know if people here are still the same people that I left. But I see some usernames that look familiar and I can take comfort in that.

MTA seems to be doing much better than before. I didn't expect it to become so popular! I'm supposed to be happy about this, because it was my dream to see MTA achieve the popularity that it deserves. But it feels like yet another thing I missed out on. I wasn't a part of MTA community during the time that it grew so much. What a shame.

Unfortunately, I don't have plans to resume MTA scripting, not big ones at least. It's a pity, seeing how MTA now has scripting features that I used to dream of. But I just don't think I currently can focus on it. Still, it feels tempting to try. I'm curious, how much have peds been improved? In the old days, I would run into problems because the peds would lose information about health, ammo and many other things, when they got streamed out, so I couldn't have them properly synced and had to resort to workarounds. What about model/texture replacing? I see there are some new related functions, so this functionality must have been improved, right? I remember trying to import Liberty City and Vice City back in 2010, and I managed to convert Liberty City, but I couldn't load it all at once, because 512 MB of RAM was not enough to replace that many models at the same time. And replacing the models dynamically (based on distance to the player) wasn't working well, there were bugs and some models weren't actually getting replaced.

My scripts website is no longer there. I still have the files, but I see someone made a GitHub repository and uploaded the resources there, so I guess it's okay as it is. The resources are available to everyone and I'm thankful for that. If I ever decided to make scripts for the community to use, I would start from scratch rather than continue working on the old ones. The same can be said about the server I had, I have the gamemode and the database, but if I wanted to run a server again, I would start the gamemode all over.

While the future of my involvement in MTA scripting is uncertain, I'm seeking to be active on this forum once again. I want to be in touch with MTA and the community. Maybe I should try helping people in scripting section or something like that. Perhaps make some tutorial. I'm much better at programming than I used to be. I'm working on my own game engine, but I don't want to make it sound like I'm doing something big or anything like that. This is another thing that I took my time to play around with. I started it long ago, I learned a lot, but I have little results. Either way, it was MTA that inspired me to do it. And I have an idea to make a common scripting interface for MTA and my engine so that scripts made using this interface would work on both. Not stating that's what's going to happen, I'm just thinking of ways to make scripts for MTA even when I have to focus on something else.

With things I learned in the recent years, some MTA script ideas that I once considered difficult to implement, look much easier now. Hell, even if I made the mistake of leaving MTA for so long, these years were still far from wasted.

That's pretty much all I wanted to say for now. I left for several years, now I feel bad about it, "but now I'm back, and I know what I've been missing". Not sure how much I'm going to be involved in MTA scripting, if at all, but I just want to be a part of this community again.

[Mamedik]

Good luck 

[Citizen]

Yes we did miss you ! Welcome back aboard !
You probably left but your were kinda still there with us as we grew with your popular resources. I think all servers have the bone_attach resource (or had at some point).
At least I did grow with your bone_attach with me.

When your website went down, it was a big hit for me, trying to find mirrors of it somewhere. But the community is always there to back it up and keep moving forward.

[ds1-e]

Welcome back
So Citizen, myself and probably many others used your resource bone_attach resource which was great for lots of various servers.

[XaskeL]

I remember carefully studying your works. Unfortunately, the site was destroyed by time, but thanks to those people that with the help of the wayback machine they were able to return what was lost. I still keep many of your works on my HDD! Many of them are still useful today, even bone_attach was useful to the community until recently. I am grateful to you for that.

[DiSaMe]

Thanks everyone, I'm happy to know my works are appreciated here.

On 04/04/2021 at 05:10, Citizen said:

You probably left but your were kinda still there with us as we grew with your popular resources.

Yes, but this is one of the reasons why I regret leaving for so long. If I had left without having done anything important for people to remember me, it would have been easier. No one looking for me and wondering where the hell I disappeared. Now it's more like I created expectations for people and then vanished.

I heard about it when my website went down, and I thought I should bring it back, maybe run a server myself, but I never did because "I'm not in the mood at this moment". Glad I didn't even have to in the end.

Anyway, it seems that bone_attach is the most popular of my resources. Its main purpose wasn't even to manage the state (attaching/detaching), its main purpose was to provide rotation calculations because that's what I considered the hard part. I remember there was a time when I could calculate 2 angles from 2 positions but not 3 angles from 3 positions, meaning I could align the object to the bone but not rotate it along with the bone around the bone's axis. But...

On 10/04/2021 at 16:46, XaskeL said:

even bone_attach was useful to the community until recently.

Yes, until recently. With getElementBoneRotation being introduced, that part is now obsolete.

Regarding my resources in general, I made them because I wanted to benefit MTA, but I remember being somewhat annoyed by relative lack of action from the rest of the community. There were servers that I enjoyed playing in, some of them running simple but original gamemodes. But like anywhere else, for every good server there were lots of not-so-good ones. And then there were many people looking for some traffic script but hardly anyone trying to make one themselves. It felt so disappointing. Ped scripting capabilities were very underused, especially considering with them you can do far more than just peds randomly walking and driving around. I mean yes, it's expected that in any gaming community most people would be just players and not scripters. But for everything that's possible to do with MTA, that was a huge waste.

Perhaps I was just overreacting because I was a little anxious, being unsure where my life was going while also worrying about MTA at the same time. But it all seems good enough now.

Edited April 12, 2021 by CrystalMV