MTA:VC Development Thread

[Towncivilian]

I've been going through mtad.scm and mtas.scm (Deathmatch and Stunt gamemodes, respectively), fixing various bugs, adding new features, and optimizing code. See also my GTA3:MTA Development Thread.

• Vice Changelog:
  
• Fixed death upon exiting a helicopter as a passenger.
  
• Implemented a check for players being dead inside vehicles.
  
• GTA continues to execute in the pause menu, no more lame pausers during deathmatch!
  
• Replay is disabled to prevent desync.
  
• Inter-island loading time shortened.
  
• Game now loads automatically after pressing "Start Game" in MTAClient.
  
• Widescreen aiming fixed. screenshot 1 | screenshot 2
  
• Draw distance doubled from default. screenshot
  
• Frame limiter forced on to avoid certain unwanted behaviors and prevent side effects of some new memory patches.
  
• All Pay’n’Sprays functioning. Color changing is disabled since it’s not synced. Do note that other players and passengers may not see the car “repaired” after spraying (even though you do), but it will have full health. Any vehicle, including emergency vehicles, is sprayable.
  
• All interiors implemented: Print Works, Rifle Range, Lawyer's Office, Apartment 3C, VROCK Recording Studio, Love Fist "Temple of Rock", Biker Bar, Auntie Poulet's house, and Café Robina.
  
• Lifts implemented: Hyman Condos, Gonzalez' house (directly behind the Malibu; Gonzalez was the guy you had to kill in the single-player mission "Treacherous Swine"), the VCN building, and the Bank Vault lift.
  
• Added all of the missing objects from Cortez's boat: furniture on the deck, door textures, the getaway boat, and the gangplank. No more drowning!
  
• Players no longer receive a golf club when entering a Caddy.
  
• Players no longer receive 5 shotgun shells when entering a Police car.
  
• Players no longer receive 20 health when entering an Ambulance.
  
• Players no longer receive armor when entering an Enforcer.
  
• Pausing on alt-tab is now disabled.
  
• GTA3:MTA’s altimeter implemented. screenshot
  
• Opened the Vercetti Mansion doors.
  
• Fixed many door and lift Z-angles to stop infinite loops if you hold down the "forward" key.
  
• All garages opened. They just open and close, no function at all otherwise.
  
• Help text for commands added to the Spectator screen. screenshot
  
• Weapon pickup message box moved out of the way of the chatbox for readability. screenshot
  
• MTA 0.4 help marker removed.
  
• Enabled second newspaper type. screenshot
  
• Player no longer receives $12 upon entering a Taxi/Cabbie.
  
• Radar is no longer visible in the “wasted” screen (the player’s blip would change direction 180º every few seconds; it looked annoying).
  
• Hospital treatment is now free (i.e., no more -$100 upon death).
  
• Wanted stars moved off-screen. screenshot
  
• Time advance disabled after you die to prevent a minor visual bug.
  
• Fixed an exploit where you could control Tommy from the spawn roof with the spawn menu still active.
  
• Optimized a massive amount of code and removed unused/debug code.
  VC DM Changelog:
  
• Vice City Crusader having 200 armor after respawning. The skin is now usable.
  
• Stubby and nade/molotov jumping re-enabled.
  
• Disabled drive-by in vehicles since it’s unsynced.
  
• The Machete is not synced. Changed VCC's melee weapon to the Hammer.
  
• Yellow Rancher at North Point Mall now respawns properly.
  
• Silenced Ingram (Tec10) at Leaf Links fixed (it gave you negative ammo, thus rendering the weapon unusable in most cases).
  
• Stunting and unique jumps implemented. Works just as in the Stunt gamemode, except your money (score) does not show up in the scoreboard, and money has no purpose at this time.
  
• Yellow Cheetah moved into "Sir, Yes Sir!" garage (in other words, into the garage it was in front of in stock 0.5).
  
• Moved Maverick and PCJ600 (yellow) spawns. The Maverick spawns on the Helipad of the building near its former spawn, and the PCJ nearby the small pier next to the bridge. Looks more realistic. The said PCJ600 also had random colors sometimes, and colors are not synced, so this bike has been given a permanent color of its typical yellow (thanks lil_Toady for pointing that out!).
  
• Ambulance replaced the red BF Injection downtown. It can be found at Vice Point Hospital.
  
• Fire Truck moved to the Fire Department downtown. Again, looks more realistic.
  
• Removed the Cleaver from the tool shops as it isn’t synced, and added the Hammer at the North Point Mall and Downtown tool shops.
  
• Golf Club spawns near the Caddy at Leaf Links.
  
• Secret Service striped suit skin spawn moved to the bottom of the stairs.
  
• “Known Rivals” text in spawn menu removed. screenshot
  
• Tweaked some spawn points’ z-angles.
  
• Corrected some pickups that had incorrect Z coordinates.
  VC Stunt Changelog:
  
• Fixed an exploit where a player would spawn in a vehicle if they pressed action/enter key during environment loading.
  
• Removed an unsynced Bloodring Banger from the Bloodring.
  
• Unique jumps implemented. If you have the time and are bored enough to do all 36 unique jumps in one game session (and your game doesn’t crash!), then you get the money/score bonus as you would in single player.

Edited January 22, 2010 by Guest

[EShef]

Doesn't this break the EULA in some way?

[:Rob]

Hey, at least SOMEONE is working on it. =/

Commendations to this guy.

[Si|ent]

Well kudos for attempting to fix what is still my second favourite mta (gta3mta is #1), but I have a few issues with it: Testing and using this will require a non-standard client, to get around various checks, something that was against the eula and frowned upon to say the least. But perhaps the teams attitude to this old version has changed now, I cannot speak for them, only give my initial reactions.

Presuming you get clearance to continue this unofficial work on it:

The VCC bug should be and is an extremely simple fix, something that was rectified by us almost immidiately when it came to light (though never released due to the multitude of other issues not being resolved to a point of release-worthyness) I am surprised that you havn't done so yourself. If you've 'half fixed' it then you are almost definately going about it the wrong way and looking in the wrong place

The other changes, the added lifts and extra interiors etc are nice but be sure to test them thoroughly with multiple players as the number of interiors included were set to a limit for very good reasons.

The biggest issue I have with your post is you do not mention at all the key problem with 0.5, the one issue that caused the many many tests and recodes, the thing that ultimately lead to a new version not being released. The player/actor desync that plagues it. The fact you have not noticed or adressed the one major problem with the mod (once it is running, the client itself has some issues) isnt a promising sign.

[lil Toady]

Even if it will get approved by the mta team i think it has to be tested out properly for a release. If not dont release it at all as it breaks the EULA, and people playing with diff clients on a server will mess the game up too much.

On the other note why not to get a separate team that would continue the work on mta0.x? I could continue the c++ part, as i have some expirience with that already

[jhxp]

Thanks for the willing to fix the underdog 0.5 version, Towncivilian.

I have no idea how this will turn out in the end, since it's violating 0.5's EULA, but I've raised a discussion about it within the QA/MTA team.

[Winky]

Its true that players crashes mostly becouse of the scm(s) (mtad.scm and mtas.scm).

Edit: Does anyone know were i can download MTA 0.5 server patch 1 again?

Edit2: That Sabre Turbo on the spawnroof spawns sometimes near little haiti

with open doors but the car is unsynced.

[zerb]

I would say in respect that most people would like to see a new structure built, which would open a path to any new availability, instead of only a small selected number of bugs being dealt with. It’s the way the game is played that most will want to see achieved and improved on.

If it gets approved, speaking for myself here, people will begin to keep on asking for more and more, we all know how it works in this community. If plans for a new beginning will ever be considered, plenty of thinking of how a washed-out version can be re-established will be the most important aspect.

I seem to be thinking to far of reach right at this point, I’ll leave it there. I’ll hand it out to the guy for giving a shot.

[Towncivilian]

The VCC bug should be and is an extremely simple fix, something that was rectified by us almost immidiately when it came to light (though never released due to the multitude of other issues not being resolved to a point of release-worthyness) I am surprised that you havn't done so yourself. If you've 'half fixed' it then you are almost definately going about it the wrong way and looking in the wrong place

The other changes, the added lifts and extra interiors etc are nice but be sure to test them thoroughly with multiple players as the number of interiors included were set to a limit for very good reasons.

The biggest issue I have with your post is you do not mention at all the key problem with 0.5, the one issue that caused the many many tests and recodes, the thing that ultimately lead to a new version not being released. The player/actor desync that plagues it. The fact you have not noticed or adressed the one major problem with the mod (once it is running, the client itself has some issues) isnt a promising sign.

About the VCC bug; I'm just going to restart with the original code and try with that. But I don't understand about looking in the wrong place; the armor code is the wrong place to look? I wouldn't think of looking anywhere else considering this bug deals with armor.

The interiors/roof accesses seem to work fine thus far, but they consume quite a lot of memory in MAIN. I can't really do much except remove bits of code to rectify that problem... assuming we don't add any more interiors/doors (I think we have them all), we have around 256 bytes of memory to work with. That's not a whole lot. I'll do some testing with a few other people later. What sort of problems did you encounter?

I'm not sure what you meant by player/actor desync. Can you clarify?

[watti]

Robber Punching,

Some times your glitched by F1

you see others in retarded skins

the other players looks snapped..

the Spectator crashers make u out of sync

Cars... are realy just not synced enough.. put HP sync and Damadge Sync

Weapons.... the Alititude... fixed

When u spawn robber ur glitched cant fire or get in cars...

can fix easy(Jump) but yeah

the VCC bug easy fixed ... dont die...

but with the bug.. you can get armour bugs.. so it causes it to...

BTW if you guys are gunna make a new MTA... i would like to help, but the only scripting i know is HTML and mIRC

[Winky]

That are not scm fixes

[Towncivilian]

That are not scm fixes

Correct. The only thing in that entire list that's fixable in scm is the VCC bug.

To those who have said I violated EULA: I've sent a request to the MTA team via the contact form asking whether I have permission to continue with this project.

[Si|ent]

The VCC bug is in the respawn code, not the armour code as such.

Desync as in apparently-random players becoming invisible in many circumstances to many of the other players, as do any vehicles they are using. (It isn't truly random, but it may as well be). This happens a lot, you may not notice it much when playing because who notices something that isn't there?! Sometimes the presence of the players tag gives it away, other times the tag itself is also gone. This a problem caused by some of the scm code as well as the corresponding code the client uses to handle it.

edit: in my opinion 0.5 is a lost cause, any hope for the old core having some kind of extended life has to lie with 0.4, both scm-wise and client-wise. A lot of mistakes were made with both @ 0.5 stage.

As a footnote, some of the things he lists ARE fixable by scm, and most by a combination of scm+client

[watti]

ok.. How bout we ask the MTA guys for the source,, cause it is Closed not open to be fixed.. so

umm... is this Basic C++ or intermediate to advanced?

[Winky]

ok.. How bout we ask the MTA guys for the source,, cause it is Closed not open to be fixed.. so

umm... is this Basic C++ or intermediate to advanced?

We dont get the source

Most desync is by exploding cars when a player is in when the player left = crash.

[Towncivilian]

The VCC bug is in the respawn code, not the armour code as such.

Desync as in apparently-random players becoming invisible in many circumstances to many of the other players, as do any vehicles they are using. (It isn't truly random, but it may as well be). This happens a lot, you may not notice it much when playing because who notices something that isn't there?! Sometimes the presence of the players tag gives it away, other times the tag itself is also gone. This a problem caused by some of the scm code as well as the corresponding code the client uses to handle it.

edit: in my opinion 0.5 is a lost cause, any hope for the old core having some kind of extended life has to lie with 0.4, both scm-wise and client-wise. A lot of mistakes were made with both @ 0.5 stage.

As a footnote, some of the things he lists ARE fixable by scm, and most by a combination of scm+client

You're saying we should try to restart from 0.4.1's scm? Blokker_1999 said the same thing in this thread. I'm starting to wonder whether I should try that; although I wouldn't be able to do anything about the client. I'm just an scm coder.

Looking at the MTA 0.5 manual, it looks like the majority of the changes since 0.4.1 are client-based. Meh.

The respawn code as in the actual skin selection part of the spawn menu? It's because VCC has no 055F "max_armor" opcode, right? I've gotten the actual VCC bug fixed that way, but when I spawn VCC then Cop, Cop has 206 armor? I didn't modify the armor portion of the code, only the spawn portion. Doesn't make sense.

[Winky]

its true that 0.4.1 scm is better than that from 0.5.

i have logged the scm crashes: 20 in a week.

[Towncivilian]

its true that 0.4.1 scm is better than that from 0.5.

i have logged the scm crashes: 20 in a week.

But how do you tell that they're scm crashes, not just some other errors?

[Si|ent]

You're saying we should try to restart from 0.4.1's scm?

No, not just the scm, the client too.

Providing of course you get the teams blessing first.

[Towncivilian]

You're saying we should try to restart from 0.4.1's scm?

No, not just the scm, the client too.

Providing of course you get the teams blessing first.

Can you tell me what language the client is coded in?

[Guest]

C++, afaik.

[Jani]

I think the MTA team should release the source for 0.5 (both GTA3 and VC) so the community can further develop it

[Guest]

I think the MTA team should release the source for 0.5 (both GTA3 and VC) so the community can further develop it

Yes, that would be the ideal solution.

[Towncivilian]

Still no word from the MTA team.

[Evolution]

Sure would be great for a reply.