The message:

[Blokker_1999]

This is a message to all our fans out there we have stood by us for the past +2 years. We have decided to stop with MTA and we are concentrating on a new project. The reason for this switch is the fact that the GTA games are too limiting to provide a basic platform for multiplayer gameplay.

Yes, MTA is more then 2 years old and GTA is not easy to mod but we are getting there. No reason to abandon all that hard work now

Therefore we have decided to start from scratch and build a game of our own. The working title for this project is “DownTown”. It will be a multiplayer based game in the line of MTA/GTA. Not much information is known at this moment about gameplay since we have just started development but we are aiming for maps with support for 128 players and support for pedestrians. The game will feature 5 cities (Brussels, Cape Town, Rio, Toronto, and Tokyo).

The 128 players was a random number. It wasn't as low as MTA but also not to high to make it unbeleivable for an action game. The cities were picked at random but we do went for some less used ones

Of course we need to expand our team and we are looking for skilled modellers and mappers. Interested? Mail us at [email protected] .

Off course our team would be to small for a project like this. This adds realism and it was fun reading the responses

Why April first? We know it’s a bad day and maybe we should have waited one more. We have been planning it for weeks now but we were unable to announce it due to talks with sponsors. That silence ended with the end of March and the first following day is today.

Again making it more belivable

We can not yet disclose what 3D engine we are using but the game will be OpenGL/OpenAL based and will be built for both Windows and Linux.

Since Linux is becoming a more and more popular platform i thought it would be a good idea to include it.

Putting a release date on the project so early is almost impossible but we are aiming for a public beta by the end of 2007 and a release somewhere mid 2008. The first art for the game will follow in a couple of days/weeks.

Release dates, who beeives them?

What about MTA? We will finish up what we started. We have dropped 0.5.1 and are working on a 0.6 that will be a hybrid between 0.5 and Blue. It will not feature the ingame gui but will use some of the more advanced features to interface with the game and it will also contain the improved netcode. At this moment we are not yet thinking about making the mod Open Source, but we will look into it in the future to ensure that the GTA community can still enjoy a quality multiplayer mod

We woudn't wonna throw away the hard work and to support the MTA community i added this section.

[Vicer/Spitfire]

Rofl.