It's this time of the year again and like before, there has been a lot of stuff going on with Multi Theft Auto. The development seems to be going well since we have opened the source for the project - there have been over 150 changes made to the code since the last post, making for an average of over 5 commits a day. You can track these changes yourself through our page on Google Code.

Additionally, a bunch of new developers have contributed to the project, either by submitting patches for fixing bugs (like fog flicker fix for users with ATI graphics cards or compatibility fixes for the linux server) or by adding new features (different skins now have their own voices, rather than all having CJ ones; initial joystick support - we will write more about this one in our next status update), all of which are certainly a benefit to the project. 

Also, lil_Toady has recently introduced initial support for loading and using custom sounds in MTASA. It is currently compatible with a wide variety of formats including MP3, WAV, OGG, RIFF, MOD, XM, IT and S3M. Along with already available custom map and model support, this will allow you to further customize the game by making it possible to add your own sounds or music to your maps and gamemodes.

In other news, we have also opened another project on Google Code dedicated to the resources included or to-be-included with the final MTASA server release. You can use them with your nightly build server, as they should be fully compatible with MTASA 1.0. You can also contribute to this project by sending your updates to the currently available resources (which would contain bugfixes, new features or just improvements in the way they work), or send your own resources for us to review, if they're useful for most people and ready for general use. The project can be found here.

Just like we have mentioned in the last post, we have introduced the roadmap for the mod. Keep in mind however that while it should give you a bigger picture of what needs to be done before release, it is not fully accurate due to the nature of the mod.

That being said, we would like to wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Let's hope that the upcoming year will allow us to bring you even better news! 

And here's a Christmas tree to celebrate the occasion:

You can comment on this news post through our forums. 

-The MTA development and QA people