We have been preparing this announcement for some time - this will mark the end of our "Developer previews".  We are working towards releasing the 1.0 version; this version is no longer a "preview" and will be a turning point for the release of Multi Theft Auto.

Why? Today we are marking a new milestone in the history of Multi Theft Auto. After over 11000 revisions since 2004, contributions by over 16 world-wide developers, 1554 files and well over 550.000 lines of mostly C/C++ code, we have made the decision to re-launch Multi Theft Auto as an open-source project.

Of course, the migration to open-source is more than just slamming your undocumented source code in a zip up for anyone that is interested. In the past weeks, we have spent significant time cleaning up our entire code repository, by adding proper documentation in files and tagging them with headers, cleaning up any obsolete or ugly code we came across, and backtracking the logs of all files to ensure that the proper credits to developers were noted inside each individual file.

By open sourcing our project, we are encouraging anyone who is willing to participate in this project, to participate. For that reason, we are not "just" offering our source code: we have also opened our bug tracker and will be offering public access to our nightly build system that will be compiling a build every day (and has been long used for testing purposes). This way, any developer will be able to run the latest revisions, file bugs or submit patches.

Some may be concerned with us seemingly throwing our code and all its secrets out on the streets. Remember that, as we have seen in the past, a proper and solid multiplayer modification needs a lot more than just memory addresses and offsets. We hope that developers will be attracted towards contributing to our project, which is fairly straightforward and has an already established user base, instead of starting from scratch.

As of today, our entire code repository will be available from Google Code, which will be hosting our project. If you are interested in participating in development, you may be familiar with the process with other open-source projects: any developer that thinks his or her modifications should be merged into our trunk can submit a patch containing their modifications to our bug tracker. Each patch will then be reviewed and hopefully merged by the development team.

We believe that access to our source code will not only encourage developers to contribute, but will also be important for educational reasons: our modification is built in a highly modularized class-based design similar to that of other somewhat bigger projects. Of course, it is far from perfect, but this leaves some good room for improvement.

By no means does the migration mean that development has stopped or that progress was halted:  we've simply decided to try a new approach to replace the old development style.  The community can now follow any progress that is made, and even see the changes for themselves.  By open sourcing, we open up the possibility of allowing unlimited community contribution - through our bugtracker, the development wiki, the community center, and of course the code itself.

Bear in mind that this migration does not imply a new release. We will be restarting our versioning, meaning that the next first release will be 1.0. Our roadmap will be available shortly on our bug tracker, so everyone will be able to track our development towards 1.0 and future versions. Nightly developer builds are also available, but are not recommended for anything else but development usage, as they will contain bugs and are updated daily.

In order to access our development facilities, head over to our community page (you'll need an account). If you're interested in checking out the code repository, head over to our Google Code project page. We'll be working towards smoothening everything out the next few days.

You can comment on this news post through our forums.

-The MTA team.

We found yet another set of critical bugs that affect all recent versions of Multi Theft Auto (using the new game-monitor.com protocol instead of the now defunct All-Seeing Eye), caused by a developer's poor practice of coding in our server browser.

One bug involves a severely incorrect parsing method of the server list. In the worst case, this means that for a lot of our players, no servers (or only a few) show up at all. This depends on the actual server count registered by the master server list.

The second bug involves invalid bit arithmetic on the IP-address, effectively causing a completely random number of servers not to show up on the list. In practice this means that probably a lot of servers don't show up correctly for our players.

This issue has been fixed and will be incorporated in the next public release. We are very unhappy with this problem as it prevents a lot of first-time users from playing. We apologize for any inconvenience and strongly recommend people to use Game-Monitor.com for a reliable list of servers for now.

As part of our server move from Dallas, Texas in the United States to our custom hardware in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, we have also completed the migration of our IRC server to a new location. Our IRC server is part of the GTAnet IRC network and provides a discussion place for anyone who's interested in Multi Theft Auto, Grand Theft Auto or related subjects.

The actual IRC server details have not changed, so feel free to visit us in #mta at irc.multitheftauto.com .

We would like to give you a little information on what we have been doing on our next version in the last few weeks.

First of all, some changes have been made that significantly affect the performance of several subsystems. For instance, our 2D GUI system, 3D DirectX drawing functions and some entity code (e.g. blips) have been optimized in order to speed up the scripts that use these things.

Apart from this, our internal network code has also been given an overhaul in the hope of increasing stability and performance for both the client and server.

Internally, our code repository was cleaned up a bit (and is still in the process of being cleaned). Needless to say, this doesn't really affect the end-user since all the compiled code remains the same either way.

Several synchronisation bugs and in-game glitches regarding peds and vehicles have been fixed.

Our serial/community user system is being revised so that it will be more stable, which is necessary because of the bugs introduced in our previous versions, which, as you may know, was partially caused by a failure of the (third-party) system that we relied on.

Apart from the mandatory fixes and tweaks, some new features have been implemented. To find out which things are new, I recommend you to take a look at our Client Scripting Functions and Server Scripting Functions pages on our wiki, which are updated with new specifications as we implement stuff. An example of things you will be able to find on there are functions for: DirectX drawing, GTA effects, garages, camera manipulation, and more.

On a sidenote: as some already know, we have registered a new domain "mtaiv.com", who knows for what to come.

Also, be sure to check out our community center from time to time (especially for people running or wanting to run servers), as it hosts all sorts of game-modes, maps and scripts, and is updated by third-party script developers on a regular basis.

It's been a while since we really provided a "real" progress update, so we're taking the opportunity to tell everyone about what's been happening under the hood.

The last public beta proved to be very useful, and this has resulted in many new changes and fixes.

As always, a number of crashes have been fixed which should make DM feel more stable.  Vehicle interpolation has been tweaked which should make it more efficient, resulting in an increase in FPS.  There have also been other changes to areas such as the streamer, which also impact the overall FPS positively.  We're hoping that issues of FPS should be reduced for the next public beta.

Occurrences of "sliding" (a form of desync) have also been further reduced, which should also be evident in the next test.  One very notable fix worth mentioning is that players can finally shoot players who are inside vehicles.  This is something that was supposed to make DP1 but was removed at the last minute.  This has finally made it and is worth testing for the next public beta.

I'll mention again that if you haven't already, join our email list by visiting beta.mtasa.com or join follow us on our twitter page to be told when and where the test is happening.

EDIT: The test is over. Again, thanks to all of those that participated.