It may be two Grand Theft Auto generations and 11 years old, but GTA: San Andreas is still very much alive. Its two most popular online multiplayer mods currently have a million or more active players between them — one, Multi Theft Auto, had 616,000 players in July (up from just 33k in February 2010), while the other, SA-MP, oscillates between about 15,000 and 50,000 concurrent players. I went to talk to members of both mod communities to find out what keeps them playing.
- Gta San Andreas Multiplayer 0.3.7
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These certainly aren’t numbers to be sneezed at. They put many of the biggest current PC games to shame. Even the massively-popular GTA 5, replete with a sprawling online mode of its own that consistently puts it in Steam’s top 10 games by player count, fares no better than its ancestor. (To put a number on it, SteamSpy estimates over 1.2 million GTA 5 players in the past two weeks, with peak concurrent players consistently around 50,000.)
SA-MP and MTA are both very similar to GTA Online at first glance. They turn San Andreas into a persistent online multiplayer world that allows players to embark on the full gamut of GTA-like activities — killing sprees, racing, stunts, heists, running away from the police, and so on. Where they differ, however, is in approach. GTA Online puts up to 30 players on each server, and it doesn’t let you choose the server. SA-MP and MTA allow much larger player counts — sometimes several hundred, depending on the server — and in traditional PC gaming style offer up a long list of servers to choose from, each of which has its own rules, available game modes, and eccentricities. The mods themselves differ in more subtle ways. MTA is open source, but SA-MP is not. SA-MP has fewer custom interfaces, quicker load times, worse synchronisation and overall performance, and more elaborate role-playing servers. (And for creative types, MTA has a map editor and an easier-to-learn scripting system.)
Grand Theft Auto San Andreas MultiPlayer 0.3d 0.3d is a Shareware software in the category Miscellaneous developed by Take 2 Games. It was checked for updates 31 times by the users of our client application UpdateStar during the last month.
I asked one of the MTA developers, a chemical engineer named Dan, to help me understand what makes this San Andreas multiplayer community tic. Dan started out as a Multi Theft Auto player back before San Andreas even came out — when the mod was available for GTA 3 and Vice City. He was drawn in by its accessibility. “At the time the big game was Counter-Strike,” he recalls. He downloaded it and gave it a shot, but it seemed impenetrable. “I’d jump in and get shot immediately and have to wait like three minutes to jump into the next round.” But with Multi Theft Auto he didn’t have to worry about being killed constantly by skilled players. He could just drive around and have fun.
That’s a big part of its appeal now, too, more than a decade later. And it’s especially noticeable if you’re coming from GTA Online, where other players attempt to shoot at you, run you over, or run you off the road every other minute. Where GTA Online has a “passive” mode that offers a scant layer of protection for newbies and non-violent players (there are, sadly, many ways to kill a player set as passive), Multi Theft Auto and SA-MP each offer hundreds of servers where cold-blooded murder is rare. As SA-MP player JasperM notes, “the GTA SA online community is a lot more friendly and less toxic than GTA Online where people randomly hunt you down for no reason.”
Dan suggests that the root of this comparative friendliness is in the mod architecture and the game itself. San Andreas plays terribly as a shooter. Its verbs — the actions players can take — may skew towards violence, but its systems and world design favour different kinds of experiences. Indeed, deathmatch servers are uncommon; players tend to gravitate more to free-roam (the world is a playground to explore and crash and do stunts in), racing (think TrackMania, not Forza; Multi Theft Auto’s initial release was actually restricted only to this), cops and robbers, and (overwhelmingly) roleplay.
Role-playing servers present the GTA that critics clamour for. Instead of using the enormous, detailed world as a playground for a mass murderer, possibly of migrant or poverty-stricken origins, who sometimes moonlights as a taxi driver or vigilante cop, they let you be a taxi driver or policeman or incarcerated criminal or dock worker or whatever else. I tried one such server where you arrive as a migrant worker with no belongings and no money beyond a 20 “ECash” cheque. Even with the money from that cheque you still can’t afford to get a job (yes, it costs money to get a job), so you need to either hang out at the bank until 6am (whereupon in a surprisingly socialist twist you’ll receive another 20 ECash) or go do bottom-of-the-barrel jobs like street sweeping, collecting trash, and mowing the golf course.
In another server, I tried my hand at being a professional trucker, a la SCS Software’s Truck Simulator games but with crappy physics and the ability to get out of the truck to walk around or stop for lunch or any of a dozen other things. I also tried my hand at a prison server that’s nigh unplayable without learning a complex set of typed commands and role-playing etiquette.
There are lots and lots of options for roleplay across the two multiplayer mods, some narrow and focused like the prison and trucking servers mentioned above and others broader and more ambitious and reliant upon a whole virtual society forming within the San Andreas world (or a custom map). Dan mentions that MTA even has a server where you can get a job as an astronaut and fly to the moon to mine moon rock.
GTA Online has delivered the traditional GTA experience in a multiplayer package — stealing cars, killing cops, driving like a maniac, punching random pedestrians while they scream or talk smack at you, and causing as much chaos as possible. “But what Multi Theft Auto has delivered is something that other people were looking for,” Dan explains. “They’re looking for these role-playing games. They’re looking for some crazy customisable races. And what we’ve been able to do is just niche into a market where people can build experiences really quickly and really easily. And players can just flock to that.” Several players I consulted emphasised this point, noting that the big variety in servers keeps San Andreas multiplayer feeling fresh in a way that GTA Online doesn’t.
They also talk about community. It’s GTA, so there are still plenty of jerks, but online staff members and anti-cheat tools keep them at bay and the tight-knit community on many servers quickly stamps out the anti-social behaviour (caveat: a few players noted that the admins on some servers are just as guilty of bad behaviour). “People play on the same server for a while and become friends,” says a player who goes by the handle Kimble. PrO.GameR echoes the sentiment, suggesting that GTA Online has considerably lower maturity levels. He also praises SA-MP’s depth. “SA-MP is the land of possibilities and the only limitations are the server scripter’s imaginations,” he says.
It helps, too, that the system requirements are modest. “A lot of our players are just on their laptops or ancient office computers,” Dan explains. “And those are the kinds of people who jump in. That’s not by design. That’s not something we intended. But that’s how our player base is growing. Because the actual experiences in the servers themselves are very complex, and they’re very elaborate. They can compete with professionally developed games.” Yet unlike those games they compare to, these San Andreas server experiences will run on an ancient rig. “Even if you just look at a race on its own, the idea that you can build custom maps and race with other online players with really modest requirements has captured a niche.”
Dan believes the low system requirements really can’t be understated as integral to MTA’s growth. “After version 1.1 we implemented translation and internationalisation,” he explains. “It’s really tapped into this market of middle eastern and Russian gamers who perhaps can’t afford a top-spec rig but they can easily install this and run it.” Put down a mere £10 to buy the game on Steam, then downgrade the executable and install one of the mods and a crappy PC can suddenly handle your pick of hundreds of popular online racing, exploration, role-playing, trucking, competitive action, flight, and stunt driving games that all run on mod servers. “I think that’s the reason why we’re successful. Because still no one’s addressing this,” Dan continues. “There’s not a commercial game out there that’s really community-driven and you can build your own game modes in [to this extent with system requirements anywhere near this modest].”
SA-MP and especially MTA — because it’s open source — differ fundamentally from GTA Online in that they are bottom-up projects. They don’t simply dictate, “this is what we think GTA should be”, but rather evolve with their community. “Our approach has just become ‘hey this is what people like doing. Let’s build towards that,'” Dan explains. And Dan says there’s almost like a chain of command. The players make requests or complaints, or play in a certain way that gets the notice of the server owners, who work with scripters to enhance the experience and file bug reports or requests directly with the mod developers for specific issues. Those improvements, such as an API for importing custom cars, will then filter back down, propagating through to other servers.
In the early days, the multiplayer mods offered what Dan calls the “bog standard” game modes — things like deathmatch, team deathmatch, some kind of assault, and other modes that were common in early-2000s first-person shooters (but now with cars and a bigger map). But it was the freeroam and race modes (and later roleplay) that gained traction and ended up setting the direction for the future.
Some of the most interesting things emerge as meta games. Dan describes how a feature of freeroam mode that lets you warp to another player’s location has on some servers sparked clan wars. “People have mastered warping to people and knifing them instantly. It’s so random, but now there’s this competitive underground thing on MTA that’s banned on some servers because people hate having people warp to them and kill them instantly.”
The dynamism of the San Andreas multiplayer community boils down to the complexity that San Andreas itself provides: a huge, sprawling, interesting map with dozens of vehicles and a cache of weapons that enable chaos and destruction on varying levels, plus a whole suite of RPG elements like the food and exercise and dating systems that we all loved and loathed and that made my CJ distinct from yours.
The mods are elaborate extensions to the San Andreas game engine, but their ambitions in enabling compelling multiplayer experiences are both matched and made possible by the ambition of San Andreas as a single-player experience. And that they’re not only still around but actually growing attests to the unending capacity of organised fans to keep a great game vibrant. People keep playing because they can, and because 11 years later the world of San Andreas still has more to offer.
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Gta San Andreas Multiplayer 0.3.7
You can create your own file review or capture your gameplay with mods, upload it to YouTube and add it to the description Add a video The description was translated automatically. Show original Good afternoon dear friends! On November 4, the author of the SAMP`a Kalcor client released a new version of San Andreas MultiPlayer 0.3.8 RC1. Also you can find it on the forum Samp`a. Especially, this update did not bring tremendous changes to the multiplayer. This can be said still test version (beta) of the client, and it is not available on the site Samp`a only on the forum. All new additions / fixes will be listed below (translation was corrected) And also if you want me to write an article about this version and that I think about it show your activity write comments in the LAN or on the mail In version 0.3.8 of SA-MP, user models on the server side will be presented. Currently, user objects and user skin skins are supported, and more types are planned in the future. Since this function potentially has a large capacity for some servers, 0.3.8 is placed in the RC early. This gives the server owners plenty of time to plan. Although there are several new security features associated with custom models, they are not already included in the current build. Use only RC version with people you trust, because there may be unknown security flaws in GTA: SA model formats. How do user models work in SA-MP User models are stored on the SA-MP server, usually in the 'models' folder. When a player connects, he is assigned a list of all the models used by the server. Players will download models as needed and save them to the CRC in the 'cache' folder. Each server to which the player connects has a separate model cache. The local cache is located in the following folder: Documents GTA San Andreas User Files SAMP cache, and then the IP.Port server. For user skins, the player downloads all these files at the beginning of the game, since the game can not be paused to load skins. For objects attached to the player, such as accessories, they must also be loaded at the beginning. This means that it is possible to have custom worlds that the player will not need to download until they enter the virtual world. Format of the model The skin format is the same as the usual game format. For object models, a collision associated with dff files is required, and this collision should be associated with the kdff tool. The basic modeling tools for GTA: SA are written for 3dsmax. Defining custom models in the file artconfig.txt Custom models are currently defined in the server's artconfig.txt file. The AddCharModel line is used to add a new player model, and AddSimpleModel is used to define a custom object that includes both world objects and objects that will be attached to the players as accessories. Quote: The players skins use ranges: from 20,000 to 30,000 (10,000 slots) Objects use negative identifiers: from -1000 to -30000 (29000 slots) Other fixes with 0.3.7 - An error introduced in PlayerPlaySound with ID 0 sound must be fixed. - NPC bots can now rotate in the same place again. I quote - New models are added servers. Game models of characters the server can load up to 10.000. I think the servers will use a maximum of 50 models, because there will be a very large load on the server. Let's take an example, we take a game model for id 230 'Homeless', and add a model on the server in the models folder of the skin 'Homeless' in HD-HQ as (does not matter) do it under the number 25001 and with the transition 230id it will be two different skins. And also if you want me to write an article about this version, how to customize data skins in the models artconfig.txt folder, and what I think about it, manifest your activity, write comments in the LAN or in the mail. On this I have everything, pleasant games for you Screenshots Add screenshots You can take some screenshots of your gameplay using modifications and upload them You can create your own file review or capture your gameplay with mods, upload it to YouTube and add it to the description Add a video |
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