Release MTAVC again for the new generation

[NoxxeR]

Lots of people wanna play this game, they have not tried Vice City yet, why cant MTA team release something? MTAVC is not that old, it can be improved.

The new generation want to play this game as well, with MTAVC, we need to try to release something in the future!

[SugarD-x]

This is quite a big subject I've covered in various other topics, so I'll try to give a "quick" reply to it.

The not-so-short-but-trying-to-make-short version is that before GTA:SA was released, the MTA Team worked on the "Blue" core for MTA:VC, which is the core that now runs MTA:SA. (They were also simultaneously working on the Green core, which MTA 0.2 and above used in the MTA 0.x series, but were also trying to move away from). The VC version of the Blue core was unfortunately abandoned by the MTA Team when GTA:SA came out for a variety of reasons, and has since been massively improved upon for MTA:SA. Due to the lack of available developers to work on all of the GTA's simultaneously, the MTA Team chose to focus solely on MTA:SA for the time being, with plans to return to the older GTA's some day. (At the time, GTA:SA was the latest GTA released). Unfortunately this never happened, and MTA:SA has remained the sole focus for the MTA Team. Because of this, over time Project Redivivus was eventually formed, and with permission we obtained the source code for MTA 0.5, which is for GTA III and VC specifically. We were also given the unfinished source code for the Blue core for VC.

Because of the state of the code in the projects, how old, encrypted, and experimental they were, (especially 0.5), and a vast majority of the original MTA Team now retired from programming for the mod, there was an extremely limited amount of knowledge and assistance still available to Project Redivivus for this code. Not knowing how it works, how messy the code was, (as it was again highly experimental for its time), and the need to keep backwards compatibility for users has made it an extremely difficult challenge to learn how the code operates and fix it.

That all being said, after many years several of the developers in Project Redivivus have also retired or gone perpetually idle for their own "real life" reasons, which has continued to set the project back. At this point, things are almost completely stalled because of a lack of developers, and because the source is still closed for security reasons, (which is planned to be changed for MTA 0.6), it is very difficult to find interested, knowledgeable, AND trustworthy people to bring on to continue development. This is why there haven't been any new releases since 0.5r2, and no new public test builds since 0.6 Nightly 1.

While I lead Project Redivivus as one of the founding members and I maintain all of the web services for the project, I do not know C++ myself, (which both MTA 0.x and MTA:VC Blue are coded in). Because of this, I am unable to do a vast majority of the work on these projects. While I have tried to fix many issues to the best of my ability, this is not something I am capable of doing entirely on my own. I would love to bring more developers on board to help with this, but again, finding interested, knowledgeable, and TRUSTWORTHY people is very, very difficult.

Now with all of that, small developments are still being made, which you can see happening in our Discord, which we run separately from the main one used by Multi Theft Auto. Currently Project Redivivus, MTA 0.6 development, and MTA:VC Blue development is also handled separately from the main Multi Theft Auto team and MTA:SA project to keep things parallel and not cause confusion, however the end goal would be to some day have all three games running on the same platform together once they are ready for such so that development and maintainability would be extremely simple, and would give users the option to just pick a game and go with one app, however this is very far down the road still.

Please let it be known, I don't want to discourage anyone from using these mods. With development on 0.6, there have been massive improvements to stability and efficiency thanks to a large number of contributors on the project over the years. MTA:VC Blue has also inspired many others to go to create similar mods for GTA and other games, some of which have become highly successful, and maintain a positive level of cooperation with MTA and their own teams overall. As long as hope remains from the players, there is still a chance that these mods will get updates that see the light of day. It's just a matter of time until the right people come along that can help contribute toward this goal.

Edited February 1 by SugarD-x

[NoxxeR]

Both MTAVC and MTASA is fantastic games for people to play. they need to survive. GTA San Andreas and GTA Vice City should be online forever

The best of all is that both modifications are programmed in the right way, loads fast and easy to play. "The way its meant to be played" like Nvidia slogan says.

Both games might be a bit older but they still rock.

Edited July 26 by NoxxeR