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Multi Theft Auto - San Andreas Goes Open Source
dan writes " Multi Theft Auto is a third-party modification for Rockstar's hit title Grand Theft Auto San Andreas — and it has become open-source after over four years of closed source development. As a (somewhat) regular player of MTA since the early days of GTAIII, this hit me by surprise, somewhat." (The news is on the project's front page, from which dan extracts more details, below.)
dan continues: "Some of the interesting parts of the post: '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.
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.
This is particularly exciting given that the released source is based upon the MTA Blue core, which in theory can be applied to any single player game. The source will no doubt be useful and provide foundations for future projects and the progression of the mod itself.'"
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.
This is particularly exciting given that the released source is based upon the MTA Blue core, which in theory can be applied to any single player game. The source will no doubt be useful and provide foundations for future projects and the progression of the mod itself.'"
I've heard fantastic, mind-bending things about Multi Theft Auto.
Apparently, enthusiast game devs grafting on a real-time multiplayer component to a single-player game to which they don't have the source results in some, shall we say, interesting sync issues. My favorite story is where one guy suddenly gets replaced with a taxi on another guy's client. He still sees himself as a character, but the other guy sees him as a taxi just "walking" around.
"Get in me!" is of course the appropriate response, and upon their union the two have a strange and jittery ride down the street, until they get to the train station. They get on the train, which the taxi guy sees as a bouncy and jittery train ride, but the other guy sees as a taxi intersecting the train, grinding endlessly against the tunnel.
Finally, something breaks, and they're no longer constrained to the map's clipping, rocketing around the city, perhaps bi- or quad-locating, and it's time to reset the server.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
They opensourced code that is not even theirs, I have my sources, trust me there is actually code in there that they got from rockstar before the hot cofee fiasco when they even supported them, i doubt they ever did permission to release that.
And they also refuse to credit some of ex-developers.
Basically they could get easily sued into oblivion.