MultiTheftAuto Mod For GTA3 Released

Ryan M. Pamplin writes "There's an announcement on the MultiTheftAuto website that the MTA v0.3b multiplayer mod is out for the PC version of Grand Theft Auto 3, a milestone for the community. Servers are popping up everywhere - we can finally play a little GTA against our pals in 3D!" We ran a story on this a little while back, but there's now a downloadable version to tinker with.

Comments

GTA 3

[sebi]

Maybe someone should note that the mod is for GTA3. The original Grand Theft Auto had multiplayer right out of the box. I can't remember if it was LAN only or if internet play was possible as well. But then that was a PC only game, right.

I wonder if precious features such as multiplayer will get rarer, now that many hit titles are ported from various consoles to proper computers. In this case the game was released with the unfinished multiplayer code and some dedicated people are getting it to work. Why did the original programmers give up at what appears to be more than half way through?

GTA3 already had MP implemented

[The Moving Shadow]

The mod was made possible due to the fact that the guys at Rockstar had already implemented a multiplayer code into the game. But since they couldn't finish it due to time and coding complications they disabled it. The dev teams that made the two multiplayer mods that are available today just enabled the old mp code and wrote a whole shell around it while fixing the code fragments that Rockstar didn't finish.

I don't know if Vice City was built upon the GTA3 engine or that the original engine was completely rebuild. In the former case we can expect there to be a multiplayer mod soon.

One word of warning with the multiplayer mod. I have played it and it's really buggy. Lots of syncing problems and you have to do strange things to get the games synced on all machine on beforehand. But nonetheless i expect a complete groundbreaking multiplayer experience when the mods have matured.

Re:Anyone tried this yet?

[moonbender]

Um, no. It was not all written by Rockstar. There are some traces of multiplayer gaming in the original code, but this basically is a huge (and neat) hack, working only because the game tracks a list of cars the players used previously. Players joining the game then get to control those cars. And the netcode is allegedly sluggish even on a 100 Mbit LAN.

Unless they changed the mod dramatically in the previous versions, that is. This is the way it worked originally - maybe they found some wonderful other way to do it. I doubt it.