20 Years of the Multi Theft Auto Project

[mea]

Happy Birthday Multi Theft Auto!!
 

[Cinematic]

Great times everyone and congratulations. These days it's so nice to see a community reach a milestone like this.

[Platin]

I was playing MTA back in 2010-2011. I wasn't even in middle school yet. I remember uploading some videos on my YouTube channel while playing DKR, good times. Sadly I can't log into that account to retrieve the videos anymore.

Now more than a decade later, I might not play as I did, but MTA introduced me to scripting, which basically defined the path I would take in life.

Regarding MTA, I'm still coding and giving my input, and I feel it's appreciated.

Happy birthday MTA and now let's aim to get to 2033 together. 

[12p]

Happy Birthday MTA!

So glad to have known about this project... Since about a decade now, for me!

Lua was my first scripting language ever, and boy was it fun to learn.

 

MTA Team, thank you for doing so much, and sorry for doing so little. So they say.

Edited February 10, 2023 by 12p

[Darjusz]

Just wanted to say thank you for making MTA, so many memories that will be told to my grandchildren!

Lots of love from Poland

POLSKA GUROM

[Ransom]

It has been a long and winding road to get to this point. Here is a condensed personal story from me for those who find it here.

After so many years and so many people and memories, its so hard to remember everything. I started with GTA2 on Dreamcast and I loved it. I was fanatical about the upcoming GTA3 release. I even bought gaming magazines just to read pieces about it in school. I never did that for any other game. Eventually, I got my copy of the game on the PS2. The game met all my expectations. For it's time, the open world 3D city was something revolutionary and very exciting. I dwelled on the GameFAQ boards for GTA games during school after it released. Back then, that was one of the gaming centers of the universe. I'm pretty sure that is where I first heard about GTA Multiplayer being created for the PC version of the game. In the earliest days I had 56K Internet (gigabit fiber now!) and a mediocre computer with no GFX card, so I missed the earliest days of MTA. It was painful for me knowing that it was out there and I couldn't play it.

By the time Vice City came out I had the means to play and really became part of the community since the first Vice City release. Vice City was actually a pretty fun deathmatch game. It worked well by abusing animation glitches to create good movement. The community grew into clans and I found one of the first users, Iggy248 and asked to join his new clan Vice City Police (VCP). We recruited a lot of talent. In the earliest days, we absolutely ruled the scene and it was a great time. Over time, a handful of our clan remained heavily active in the community and became closer to the development team. We would eventually be invited to beta test. Throughout time our roles and contributions increased.

A handful of our crew moved on to be key contributors and one even became an MTA code developer. When GTA:SA released, development exploded and so did the need for contributors. As heads of the QA Testing Team (Rebel, JHXP, myself), our new "clan" consisted of finding the right people to test and contribute. I think we did a pretty good job at finding a lot of talented people. You could say this was a lot of luck. Personally, now at this point in my life after having similar experience elsewhere, I feel like I have had some skill and some part in bringing the right people together and keeping them together. However, I recognize that I am also stubborn and bull-headed, so I had failures and fallouts with people as well. I don't think you can lead without losing some friends. When disagreements happened, they were heartfelt and horrible, but I laugh thinking about most of them now. Some of them I deeply regret when I remember them. If any of those people are reading, I apologize to you if there are still any ill feelings.

As mentioned in the OP, there were a lot of systems and I contributed significantly to most of them as staff and as a tester on behalf of the developers. I would say I am most proud of the original MTA:SA race editor. It was extremely popular and nothing let you edit & test directly inside a GTA game before this moment. At heart, I've always liked creating custom content, so this was of immense interest to me. I did the lion's share of bug reports/testing/features for this thru something we had called Mantis Bug Tracker. Thank you eAi and ChrML specifically for letting me drive you insane haha. I made a lot of races with that editor, but the best thing I made wasn't a race at all. I bastardized the race mode into a birth of the Destruction Derby game mode, with a map of the same name. It worked, because the race would end if only one car was left. I see the destruction derby game mode in GTA5 MP with pickups and it is very much the same way they were on that first map I made. I have no doubt that Rockstar Games took ideas from MTA for their online prototyping. You can look for "gta destruction derby" on YouTube and see now how big that game mode is alone. The GTA community is massive!

Contributing to this community ultimately changed the course of my life. I learned a lot of various skills in the Computer Science field and it really propelled me towards being the IT worker I am today. From building my first computer to coding my first piece of code, the guys were there to help me along. It enabled me to pickup a lot of concepts of IT quickly and also to be efficient at what I do. Even though I got a business degree, I couldn't escape my fate haha. I still catchup with some of the people I worked with thru the years on our Discord. Every once in a blue moon, some long distant name will come out of the woodwork and namedrop me. It's overwhelming how many people you can meet over many years!

Edited February 10, 2023 by Ransom

[Tut]

Happy anniversary 

[eAi]

This is an amazing milestone. I've not been involved really now since around 2007-8, but for some years Multi Theft Auto was (almost) my life. I spent most of my nights and spare time as a teenager and while at University focused on developing MTA. I started playing almost back at the start - probably a month or so after the initial MTA for GTA 3 was released. I remember trying to play - and finding the experience really quite bad - endless crashes and loads of limitations, but I loved MTA from the start: the way it opened my eyes to a technical way of achieving was initially seemed impossible, the ambition of the project and the enthusiastic community around the project. Everyone could see what MTA should be - the product vision was obvious - it was just a massive challenge to get it there. 

As I was a fairly competent Visual Basic programmer (the first version of MTA was built by modifying an existing trainer for GTA3) I was able to get involved and help out fairly quickly. IJs let me join around the time that MTA:Blue was just starting development. This was a big rewrite of MTA and the foundations of what MTA is today. I cut my teeth as a C++ programmer with this project which was really ambitious - we were almost writing a parallel game engine alongside the GTA engine that had to map almost 1-2-1 to it. This involved learning a lot of techniques for reverse engineering, C++ and assembly language.

At this time, there was probably a core of 2-3 people working actively on the project in their spare time as developers and there was a lot of pressure to deliver something. We deliberately picked an easier goal - adding a racing mode, so that we didn't need to achieve some challenging features such as shooting synchronization. MTA Race was a big success and it was around this time that we had the rise of other copycat mods which really heaped on the pressure. At times the community seemed to turn into a battlefield between the different mods with cheaters thrown in the mix. We also had to handle various people from the cheating community making cheats as performing DDOS attacks against our infrastructure. Now days these things are easier to mitigate against, but as a small volunteer run project, these caused us a lot of hassle.

After MTA Race, we were really ambitious with what we wanted to achieve - we wanted to add scripting to the game, and we wanted to build a modding infrastructure that was really flexible. I remember being proud of designing the resource system that MTA is still using today (though I'd definitely do some things differently now!) The version we released was really powerful - with a pretty good, extensible editor, downloadable resources, a web admin interface and pretty good synchronisation of gameplay.

At times during the development I was the only developer for a while, so I like to think that MTA wouldn't have survived if I hadn't carried on fighting to make progress. I remember spending a whole summer trying to get shooting to work! But I think MTA was such a strong idea and had such a fan base that I'm sure someone would have picked up the torch.

Now days I run a small games development company (www.fireboltgames.com) and I've worked professionally in the games industry for the last 15 years, and I'm certain I wouldn't have got where I am or have the skills I do without MTA, and for that I'm really glad. It's still one of the most successful things I've worked on and one I'm really proud of. It's certainly the longest-lived! We actually created a Roblox game recently inspired by the Hay mode made by Aaron for MTA - check it out here: https://www.roblox.com/games/6645345380/Climb-King

The community around MTA was what made it all worth it - it was hard work, but there were so many good, enthusiastic people, all working together towards a common goal. We never met - we never even talked (this was before voice-chat was so widely available!) - but we were good friends and had a lot of respect for each other.

All in all, this is a really well deserved milestone and I'm so glad I had a chance to be part of the history of this great project. Here's to another 20 years!

PS: I designed the front page about 16 years ago - it is probably time to update it!

Here's a few random screenshots from my archive:

MTA:Green (MTA:Blue for GTA3, never released):

http://opencoding.net/old_opencoding_net/misc/MTA/green_progress_6.JPG

Old website design:

http://opencoding.net/old_opencoding_net/misc/MTA/mta_site_design_2.jpg

http://opencoding.net/old_opencoding_net/misc/MTA/mta_hud_9d.JPG

[Al3grab]

Happy Birthday MTA! I started playing and scripting at around 2011, had a small deathmatch server running for a while with a great community. I can say that the experience I got hosting my own server and creating my own mods really helped me start my professional career in tech. Thanks for the memories MTA!

Edited February 10, 2023 by Al3grab

[Impzy]

Stop playing with yourself!

[Haxardous]

Some recent stuff:

 

Edited February 11, 2023 by Haxardous

[Carlos Dorelli]

Happy Birthday Multi Theft Auto!!

[C4N]

HAPPY BIRTHDAYY!!!!!!!! 

[-ffs-PLASMA]

OOOf thanks for the all those great memories. Sadly I miss alot of the old MTA:Race and 2010s times.

Made a playlist with very old videos (12+ years) most from old race client times:

 

[SciNEStist]

Slothman Here!,( Under My new handle that I'm using since my email for my old login is long gone.)  Was thinking about MTA today and I was shocked to see we had just hit the 20th anniversary! That is an achievement in itself!

I'm still Proud of the scripts I contributed to this game, And I love seeing that some people are still using myscripts Stealth,  Zday, and Slothbot. (or at least, variations of them) I actually learned to code with the help of this community. Just like everyone else, I was overflowing with game ideas, and this Mod made it possible to actualize them! I still code games for fun to this day. (right now I am working on Homebrew NES games!)

Multi Theft Auto was a bit of an addiction back then, Many nights were spent awake untill 7am, chugging Jolt Cola and madly re-writing my garbage code. But the most fun I had was playing GTA3 Dodo and shotgun duals, Heli fights and Clan matches in VC, and climbing Hay Bales in SA

I hope that most of the team have moved on to monetize their talents, As to this day I haven't seen a more professionally built Mod community.

Heres to the first and best online community I was ever part of!

[DiSaMe]

21 minutes ago, SciNEStist said:

Slothman Here!,( Under My new handle that I'm using since my email for my old login is long gone.)  Was thinking about MTA today and I was shocked to see we had just hit the 20th anniversary! That is an achievement in itself!

I'm still Proud of the scripts I contributed to this game, And I love seeing that some people are still using myscripts Stealth,  Zday, and Slothbot. (or at least, variations of them) I actually learned to code with the help of this community. Just like everyone else, I was overflowing with game ideas, and this Mod made it possible to actualize them! I still code games for fun to this day. (right now I am working on Homebrew NES games!)

Multi Theft Auto was a bit of an addiction back then, Many nights were spent awake untill 7am, chugging Jolt Cola and madly re-writing my garbage code. But the most fun I had was playing GTA3 Dodo and shotgun duals, Heli fights and Clan matches in VC, and climbing Hay Bales in SA

I hope that most of the team have moved on to monetize their talents, As to this day I haven't seen a more professionally built Mod community.

Heres to the first and best online community I was ever part of!

Oh, hey there Slothman! Long time no see. Although I do not tend to know people well (since I'm not a very social person), you're one of the people I remember when I think of the old days. For this reason, when I returned to this forum a couple of years ago, after not visiting for several years, it was sad to find that some of the people I could recognize, including you, were no longer here. So happy to see you again!

Because peds are my favorite MTA feature, I consider your creation of Zday and Slothbot an important step towards getting the community to use this feature (although I'm not sure if I have even seen Slothbot in action). But I can still remember feeling disappointed when peds remained criminally underused.

My NPC HLC resource that I made in 2012, was supposed to serve as a library for people who want to control peds from their scripts without having to take care of low level stuff like individual control states - thought it would make ped scripting more popular. But even though I based my traffic resource on it, in the end it hardly got anywhere, because of all things I wanted to implement, it only had the most basic tasks.

From what I know, there have been more people making use of peds in the recent years. But I still want to do what I was trying to do many years ago. To turn ped scripting into an easy task that even beginners could do.

[SqueX]

Happy Birthday!

[Shady1]

 

Edited February 12, 2023 by Shady1

[SciNEStist]

Peds was pure art! if there are any freeroam servers not using it, they are doing it wrong.

[Simple0x47]

Such an awesome community! I have to thank the developers of MTA for creating such an amazing opportunity for people to get hooked on programming through Lua scripting. So, thank you very much for everything MTA Team & Community!

[l2ebel]

wow 20 years and still going, thats insane, congratulations to everyone that contributed to, and played MTA!

 

from when i joined, up to when i left for australia, this project has been my beautiful prison of self isolation for drug induced psychosis.

i hated my real life job back then, it was mind numbing and lonely, this was my second job that i loved for the creativity, the company and the energy, everyone was in it for the same goal and for no compensation.

Thanks for all the trust that has been given to me and all the great times.

my favourite memory is release days, just watiching IRC go ape:~, unable to keep up with reading etc, then helping people out with problems and recieving all their overwhelmingly positive feedback.

it has been a great journey and one that could not be replicated to this day for me personally, i keep looking back with a smile. i did not get into any IT related job but im very happy to read about so many oldies having their careers kinda kickstarted trough MTA!

 

As Ransom said, kinda difficult to watch Rockstar copying everything we did 1:1 (even all my personal 3d models) but today i see it as a tribute to our creativity and skill, tbh i still think they could use a bunch of help for their multiplayer.

MAD_BOY: DK won turf wars, that was also an official tournament in my book!

 

take care everyone, youre awesome!

[MAD_BOY]

21 hours ago, l2ebel said:

MAD_BOY: DK won turf wars, that was also an official tournament in my book!

Holy crap, I completely forgot about Turf Wars. We really dominated that one.

[CrayMTA]

What a ride down memory lane (and yes this is the original Cray... I have long since lost my original login/email to these forums, but rest assured that I have been a lurker ever since). It's great to see jhxp, eAi, Ransom and so many others continuing to progress this far past anything I had dreamed of in the early days pushing code out, spinning up a server on my basement server and getting some folks in IRC to help me test. Amazing.

Keep up the great work!

 

I forgot to say that I still cringe at my interview. Don't worry, I am much more comfortable speaking infront of crowds as a 40 year old

 

[Slayer]

Apologies for bumping an aging thread, but I wanted to take a minute to acknowledge the impact this mod has had on me. I played GTA:SA religiously on my slim PS2. I 'graduated' to the PC version when I was around 14, sometime in early 2010. It was then that I came across MTA. I invested so much of my time in MTA making friends, some of which I still talk to. I found a love for scripting and 3d modelling because of the people I met through MTA. I lost some interest a few years ago, but this mod gave me a good 5-6 years of entertainment and joy. I still get on occasionally, and I'm always amazed at how far it has come. Script hackery is no longer necessary for custom models, and it's possible to create just about any kind of UI imaginable. The struggle is no more.

 

Very grateful to the entire MTA team and community for all of the fun times and friendships I've made over the years. Definitely helped me through some rough teenage years. 

 

Much love. Happy 20th!

[TheGam3r23]

Damn. I've met quite a few good friends in this game, some have gone off the radar for a while some I still talk to daily but the memories will last forever.