Multi Theft Auto (MTA) is an open-source software project that adds full on-line gaming support to Rockstar North's Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas PC game, in which this functionality is not originally found. It is the first open-source modification that adds a highly customizable network play element to a commercial closed-source single-player PC game. Developed as an experimental piece of software for earlier Grand Theft Auto series, Multi Theft Auto has become an advanced multiplayer platform for gamers and developers. Our software provides on-line gaming for dozens of players running user-generated gameplay content and scripts through a Lua virtual machine, and is freely distributed under the GPLv3 license.

Post news Report RSS [2014] A Year in Recap and Season Greetings

The end of the year is near, so it is time for a little progress update for you guys.

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We are working hard towards our next release, but for now, let's recap the most important things that happened this year:

  • Few months later, after a long development time we had finally released the MTA:SA 1.4 at the end of July. This release, aside from bug fixes, brought you some fantastic and long-time requested features such as Lua OOP (Object-Oriented Programming), user interface translations (known as l10n or localization) or the updated anticheat system.
  • Speaking of security as well, the MTA:SA 1.4 release had enforced the use of our Lua online compiler for compiled scripts. The online compiler, while being highly controversial (and rightfully so), seemed like an only viable solution to a security problem that was much bigger than convenience at the time or the compatibility with already compiled scripts. It was all explained later in Talidan's lengthy post. The transition went fairly smooth - those who were not using compiled scripts were not affected at all, and those who were just recompiled their scripts using the Lua online compiler or left the mod altogether. The problem was with a group of server owners who only had their compiled scripts without access to the original source files. This might have caused them other problems in the future though, due to not being able to edit the precompiled script eg. to add new features or comply with the syntax changes.
  • More recently, Steam users have most likely noticed that their GTA:SA installs were updated a few times in November and December. This caused some game crashes, but we have dealt with it quickly so our mod retained compatibility with the Steam version.
  • We also set new records for the number of concurrent MTA players. On 8th of November, we had nearly 22.700 players ingame at the same time, with nearly 130.000 unique players who joined any server that day. In general, we had over half a million of unique players each month (excluding February with ~490.000, but peaking on August with over 560.000 players), which was a noticeable improvement over a last year, when we never reached half a million of players in any of the months.

A lot of effort was put into new features, which you may see in the future MTA versions, such as ingame web browser (courtesy of jusonex96), custom sound and voice improvements (Cazomino05) and OOP tweaks (qaisjp). We have also worked on regular bugfixes and performance optimizations (sbx320, ccw, jusonex96 and others) which are already present in most recent MTA:SA 1.4 builds or will be included in the next major release, which looks to be promising indeed.

Lastly, we would like to thank you for your continued support. The mod keeps growing every day, and that is all because of you, our fans. Let's hope that we can make the next year even better for MTA.

See you in 2015!
--MTA Team!

(You can view the original post here: Forum.mtasa.com)

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