Guest Posted June 27, 2003 Share Posted June 27, 2003 First of all I want to thank the people who made MTA. Since you ask for help on future projects, I want to know how was it possible for you guys to program MTA, how did you even start making MTA? I know you didn't crack the code of GTA3, because you said it yourself, and R* would not give it to you for sure, so does that mean there are no tools on the internet to crack the code files in GTA3? Since I have a broken foot(skateboarding ), I can't really do much, besides eating and being online, I was wondering if you could tell me some insight on the files that need to be cracked for code and maybe some good programs to use. I will try to search for as many programs as possible to crack the codes of GTA3 if possible at all. Also, this question might have been asked already, but I can't find it. When I connect and start playing MTA, I saw one guy not responding to buy violent actions and I guess trying to walk somewhere another one was on the helipad of the police building of the second island and about six more guys on a rooftop of a building besides the Mafia mantion. Is this the cause of my slow connections (dial-up I think it said 3.1 D\L), or is it a bug? Link to comment
Si|ent Posted June 27, 2003 Share Posted June 27, 2003 The cracking/coding i cant help you with. the guy 'walking somewhere' and not dying is a lag issue, either desynch has struck (dont carjack anyone!) or he has lost connection/quit and the games not caught up yet. The 6 people on theroof (more than 6 in fact ) are 'the players to be' the models that are assigned to the player and moved into the map when you choose your team. The guy on top of the helipad, i presume u mean the 'choose teams' helipad would be for similar reasons to the wandering man, or the player may just have been afk. so the lag wont be helped by you being dialup, but id say its mainly down to mta beeing at an early stage of development. (i play via dialup too and it doesnt spoil my enjoyment) Link to comment
Silencer131 Posted June 28, 2003 Share Posted June 28, 2003 Yeah, I asked that a few times, too already but never really gota satisfying answer. It would be a really good idea if the MTA team put up a link on the main site which tells visitors how it was possible at all to create a multiplayer mod without any official support and without hardly any multiplayer code in the game. "About MTA" does not really say much at all unfortunately. Believe it or not, but people are interested in stuff like that. Link to comment
Cray Posted June 28, 2003 Share Posted June 28, 2003 Well, although I cannot answer in full because I came on to the team after it was started (same with YaMM), I can offer atleast a little insight into the development world. The Multiplayer Mods essentially were able to start when people were able to crack the format of the main.scm. Having this format allowed developers to write disassemblers and assemblers that allowed anyone to pack and unpack any main.scm and look at _part_ of the game's content. If you do not already know, the main.scm is somewhat like a scripting language built for the GTA games that allow Rockstar to define what happens at what point throughout the entire game. All of the actual game content code (how things react, happen) are in this file. Now, having this file and knowing how the game reacts allowed MTA to start playing around with all of the features. It was determined that through the main.scm, MTA could control a lot of the games functionality and add actors (in which can be controlled). That is it for now, there is a lot more research and development that we have done, and a lot more technology that we have used. But that gives you a glimpse of the beginning stages. Link to comment
Guest Posted June 29, 2003 Share Posted June 29, 2003 well I started searching other websites for info on GTA3 coding and I found this article: Mission Code What's it all about? The mission code - the script that's run by the game engine that takes your through each and every mission narative. What files are we talking about? Erm, not entirely sure. Best guesses is the main.scm file that's in the root directory. What do we know? We don't really know much about it yet. Currently there's two schools of thought - one is that GTA3 uses MaxScript - part of the GMax package that's been used to create the game engine of GTA3. In my opinion this is unlikely, as GTA3 requires a rather complex and unique scripting system, which GMax is unlikely to support. The other theory is that it takes on a similar approach to the previous GTA games. GTA1 and it's offspring, the GTA Londons, all were based around a mission.ini, a simply and rather crude programming language. GTA2 was much more advanced, with the missions split up into seperate files and each one encoded. I recon GTA3 will be similar to GTA2 - as we've already seen various patterns between the two appear (for example, the GXT language files were compiled in a similar fashion). The main.scm file looks a possible candidate on the encoded-mission-file-stakes-for-gta3 award. A quick glance in notepad with this file shows, amongst all the encoded crap, various labels which seam to link to the GXT files. It would make sense to suggest this is someway related to mission coding. My only reservation is that it seams too small for the whole of the GTA3 mission scripting. GTA1's mission.ini was way over a MB, so you'd think GTA3's would be a bit larger. Main.srm, weigning in at only 600kb, seams a bit puny. It's unlikely to be compressed in any away (as we can still read some of the file), so unless they've hit apon a brilliantly scripting language, it would be a suprise to see the main.scm would be the sole scripting file. Infact the name alone suggests that there are other files other than the 'main' one. The search goes on... Update : after looking at a GTA2 compiled .scr file, there are definate similarities between that and GTA3's main.scm. Looks like we might be on to something... Are we going to be able to mod this? High. If the main.srm file is the mission scripting file, then it's possible that someone will work out the encryption of the file and we'll be away. Failing that, I still see no reason why DMA won't release de-compiler and documentation for GTA3 once it's been released for the PC. They have done for the two previous games. What programs will we be using? Either a third-party notepad-style program which can compile and decompile the files (such as GTA3Mods Development Suite ), or DMA's in-house program. Contributors : Stilton, Jevon, illspirit, Spooky. Last Update : 15 January 2002 Stilton I hope it has been helpful to all of you guys who want to learn anything about gta3's code and stuff you can find this article and a lot of mods for gta3 here http://www.gta3mods.com Link to comment
me Posted June 30, 2003 Share Posted June 30, 2003 um... you do realise that that thing was updated a year and a half ago.. right? everything they're talking about there has already been done (main.scm editors), or figured out (how missions and GTA3 works) Link to comment
Silencer131 Posted July 1, 2003 Share Posted July 1, 2003 Well, although I cannot answer in full because I came on to the team after it was started (same with YaMM), I can offer atleast a little insight into the development world.The Multiplayer Mods essentially were able to start when people were able to crack the format of the main.scm. Having this format allowed developers to write disassemblers and assemblers that allowed anyone to pack and unpack any main.scm and look at _part_ of the game's content. If you do not already know, the main.scm is somewhat like a scripting language built for the GTA games that allow Rockstar to define what happens at what point throughout the entire game. All of the actual game content code (how things react, happen) are in this file. Now, having this file and knowing how the game reacts allowed MTA to start playing around with all of the features. It was determined that through the main.scm, MTA could control a lot of the games functionality and add actors (in which can be controlled). That is it for now, there is a lot more research and development that we have done, and a lot more technology that we have used. But that gives you a glimpse of the beginning stages. Hey thank you very much first of all, that is a lot of the information I wanted to hear. So in other words you cannot just change things but you can also add them, like the multiplayer mode, that is impressive. I can imagine to add stuff like new guns or missions but a complete multiplayer code... unimaginable (for me only of course ), really well done, guys! But then I don't understand this... you said the file was encoded (as probably every exe file and such are too)... it is possible to crack the code and get a readable file? And I always thought a compiler encoded a file in a way that you can never get it back into the source code (readable) language? At least that is what I learned somewhere in the past. Link to comment
Cray Posted July 1, 2003 Share Posted July 1, 2003 The main.scm is "encoded" in a way that allows it to be disassembled into human readable text and assembled back to the "encoded" form. Link to comment
Silencer131 Posted July 1, 2003 Share Posted July 1, 2003 Hey thanks a lot for all! You know, you maybe should really put your text you posted here into some form and put it into "about" on the main page, people are curious about stuff like that. Link to comment
Cray Posted July 2, 2003 Share Posted July 2, 2003 When development calms down a bit I may sit down and try to write all of the information I know and publish it somewhere on the MTA website (obviously without giving away MTA secrets). I have not decided if or when I may do this, but we will see. Link to comment
Guest Posted July 2, 2003 Share Posted July 2, 2003 I would really appreciate if you would post detailed info about cracking/decoding the code of gta3 whenever you get the time. (Maybe in a sticky) I'm sure people would like to know how to do it and maybe even try to do it themselves and when they cracked it and know enough about it they will most likely help you guys out with stuff that you might have missed or couldn't figure out. I am sure that you would still need help with code to create the ultimate multiplayer mods for GTA3 and Vice City. Link to comment
Silencer131 Posted July 3, 2003 Share Posted July 3, 2003 Well I doubt they will post stuff like that (I guess this belongs to the "secrets" of MTA) and I can understand that. I'm glad about the info that was already given since that is what I wanted to know. If you want to know that kind of stuff you just asked for then maybe you should consider joining the MTA taem. Link to comment
me Posted July 3, 2003 Share Posted July 3, 2003 have you checked out other mods? might be something there... or on gtaforums.com Link to comment
SeB Posted July 4, 2003 Share Posted July 4, 2003 Hi all! This is a really interesting post and I was just wondering: Is it possible to open the main.scm file with notepad or is there a program to edit the main.scm? Because I tried with notepad and it just showed crap that nobody could ever understand. Link to comment
Warlord Archon Posted July 4, 2003 Share Posted July 4, 2003 Well if you opened it with notepad, then i guess you can, can't you. You have to have a program to open it. Link to comment
SeB Posted July 4, 2003 Share Posted July 4, 2003 Do u know a program to open the MAIN.scm file? Link to comment
Silencer131 Posted July 4, 2003 Share Posted July 4, 2003 That crap is called machine code and it's supposed to be that way. As one of the MTA guys said, you had to decode it first. Link to comment
Recommended Posts