If you tried to upload a mod to GTAGarage within the past few days, you were probably confronted with an error message - doh!
This was an unfortunate side effect of a recent server upgrade. Locating the cause of the problem took longer than expected, however uploads are now working again. And thanks to the server upgrade, uploading your mods should be faster than before!
Has you may have noticed our modding boards have been layed out in a different order and form. After a long discussion we felt like this was the best solution for the modding section.
We're waiting to get your feedback if you're a regular poster in there, let us know what you think or what can, still, be improved, over here.
"There's no reason to become alarmed, and we hope you'll enjoy the rest of your flight. By the way, is there anyone on board who knows how to fly a plane?"
Starting this week, we'll be taking you all on a tour around the modding neighbourhood of the Grand Theft Auto community. There's mods for every kind of taste, pointless, awesome and some really weird ones. Most players go mod hunting as soon they finish the storyline, we will show you some that will give your game a huge boost of adrenaline, giving you the impression you just picked up a new game.
GTANet Annual Forum Awards 2008
The voting closes Sunday 22nd February, go vote now for your favourite mods and tools!
Featured Discussion
Lots of players have been waiting for the modders to give them usable planes, but they are almost there, with a car! If you're interested in flying yours, follow this info and the videos in that thread.
Interview
We've been talking to Jost_Vice, current leader of the project Gostown, to bring you some details on the mod. Keep reading to find out more about it.
GTAG: What is Gostown6 exactly, just a new map?
JostVice: Gostown 6 is a total conversion mod for Grand theft auto San andreas. The mod has been alive for one year, and it had changed since it started. At the moment the map is pretty big, almost like San Andreas's countryside and follows a tropical theme for the landscape, with palm jungles and a New York City theme for the city. We have replaced a big amount of vehicles with scratch made ones, which is probably the part of the mod that most people has contributed to.
GTAG: Aside from the great map to explore, will we have some missions to go with it?
JostVice: The actual beta version (The next one that will be released) has got two or three tiny missions to play with, the fact that there aren't much skilled mission coders make it harder to code missions.
GTAG: Did you include Gostown in any of the GTA cannons or is it non related?
JostVice: No... the only involved thing with GTA is the sandbox feel. The planed storyline that can be seen on our topic doesn't match a GTA storyline. Still, we would like to include some of the game-play elements, such as racing.
GTAG: How many members do you have working on the mod right now, and what are they're tasks?
JostVice: Right now we have a total of 17 contributors:
- JostVice as leader (Vehicle modeller, Map modeller, Main mod organization/planing...)
- Paroxum as co-leader/leader (Map Modeller, organization and planing)
- Pinky (Vehicle modeller, mission coding)
- Vaderios (Graphic artist and planer)
-- Contributors --
- _6mik_ (Handling editing)
- Mark (Vehicle modeller)
- Acoustik, UZI-I, mordecki and Raycen (DLL coding and mission coding)
- Fredskin, Dabeast, Dizturbd (Map modellers)
- Marfi, Karol, Rodrigp (Vehicle modellers)
- Tripleas (Ped modeller)
I hope I didn't forget anyone.
GTAG: Why a tropical island? Is there any other motive than having a good looking map?
JostVice: We wanted to do something different to any other GTA mod, and chose a tropical theme... which is also beautiful!
GTAG: Do you have any plans to port this into IV in the future?
JostVice: It would be definitely a dream coming true, but it wouldn't be possible if we ported it, we couldn't just do a port. The map and vehicles will need to be remodelled to match GTA:IV's quality and with the actual number of members in the group... it would take some time.
GTAG: What problems or limitations have you encountered when working with SA?
JostVice: There are problems, yes, maybe the most noticeable one is the streaming memory limit (64 MB if I remember correctly) that was increased using Sacky's SA limit adjuster increasing this limit allowed us to use more HD textures, wich means, more quality for the mod. Another problem, maybe not known by people, is the fact of that SA doesn't have any SDK, and we have to work using non-official tools, the work that has been put by the authors of these tools is incredible, and we love them, but using them sometimes end up in bugs.
GTAG: For the readers that I'm sure that are willing to give a try right now, what's the specs you recommend to run this mod?
JostVice: The recommended specs are a bit higher than SA's default ones:
Intel 2GHz dualcore, 1GB RAM, ATI X1800 or NVIDIA 7800 (All series) and 800MB free on hard disk. For all the rest, look at default SA specs.
GTAG: You were talking earlier about new vehicles, how many are they and which ones?
JostVice: We've replaced a high number of vehicles, sports car, muscle cars, normal poor cars, trucks or even airplanes.
GTAG: What is EVA?
JostVice: Eva is the new character, replacing CJ. We have planed a storyline that involves Eva as a assassin that will have to eliminate some targets in the paradise, getting different rewards as properties or new vehicles.
If you wish to follow the team's progress you can do it right here.
Alexander Blade has created a tool that enables you to spawn any car near the player. For more information and a download link, please visit our forums.
Grand Theft Auto IV (PC) Car Spawner by Alexander Blade.
For all the latest GTA IV PC mods, visit GTAGarage and GTAForums. Both of these sites are linked, so you can use the same login details on both.
Hello all, just a quick note to say that the recently added Mod Manager has been renamed to Edit Mods in order to prevent confusion with GGMM. A few more cosmetic updates are due shortly as we continue to update the website. If you have any problems accessing or using the website, please email your bugs to stm@gtanet.com, and we will help to fix them as soon as we can.
GTA4 may have taken the world by storm, but the PC world is still yet to enjoy the latest installment on their preferred platform. It is the task of modding to breathe the magic back into the classic GTAs, and what better way than to add the originally intended multiplayer functionality to them? After the successes that were SA:MP and MTA comes a complimentary alternative, Project Andreas Reloaded.
Like its counterparts, PAR is designed as a plugin to San Andreas that will allow the user to connect to a server and play other connected users via the internet or a network. I asked its creator, Pixels^, a few questions:
What is your inspiration and/or motivation behind the mod?
Mostly what details that SA:MP and MTA don't work on. Such as modifying the HUD or controlling special vehicle items like lights. Also the lack of updates, I plan on making less big releases and making the releases much smaller and faster, sort of what Apple does for Mac OS. This mod although, is no way meant to compete with SA:MP or MTA. I myself am a very strong SA:MP supporter and this mod is just meant to be an alternative to the Apple and Microsoft of San Andreas multiplayers. There is no telling exactly what features we will build on, time will tell.
How long have you been working on it?
Well I started on it around 2 weeks ago. It was buggy and didn't work then, I forgot about it for a few days, and when I was bored like around a week ago, I recoded the packet transfers and the connection manager, and managed to get Seif to help me test. I was actually surprised how good the sync was working.
What other aspects of modding have you explored in the past?
I used to be a txd modder, I would make my own textures and load them into the game and make all my vehicles look good. I also did some minor game mission coding.
What features do you have planned for the mod once you have the basics completed?
A must for most developer is to see how much RAM & CPU they use when they are playing, we are planning to include a cpu & ram meter ingame so you can see what is going on. One feature I love that, is already added, is the ability to see who connects/disconnects and who chats, all while your loading the game. We plan on special commands to control the color of HUD. For example turn your health bar color to blue. Then maybe a keybind for controlling vehicle lights and such. As we go along in the development, we'll receive lots of suggestions from players and testers and we hope to build on them. We really can't say all of the features that will be in 0.1, since we don't really know yet.
Can you give an estimate as to when a public release might be available?
2-3 months from now. That's not a rough estimate ether.
We have a small progress list for testers and developers to see and so far most of the things on the list are done.
Foot Sync - Done
Vehicle Sync - 10%
Weather System & Sync - Done
Ram & CPU Usage Monitor - 20%
Chatbox - 98%
Swim Sync - 20%
We have lots of screenshots and videos for a preview of the multiplayer. The second youtube video is a little dark because of chinatown's dim lighting. Next videos will be shot in a much brighter environment. In some of the videos, you can see the custom HUD colors. I spend atleast 3 hours of coding a night on this mod, so we should be spitting out videos atleast once a week.
Due to recent developments, we've been able to get v1 fully online again while running it alongside v2 development. You may continue to post your mods here as usual, and they will be transferred to the new system upon its completion. We will also be incorporating a few new features to v1 in order to test their popularity and functionality, and will post v2 updates as they come.
A couple of minor new features that have been added since v1 went back online:
Mod submissions are now rejected rather than deleted. Users are able to edit the original mod submission and resubmit it for moderation (obviously the original reason for rejection will have to be fixed before the mod be approved).
Notification messages of approval or rejection of a mod will be sent to users.
We're pleased to announce development of the new updated GTAGarage, that is aimed for launch later this year. Due to technical difficulties that arised while synchronising our new servers last year, along with a lack of sufficient bandwidth, our upload feature has remained out-of-action since Autumn 2007 - we would like to apologise to all our dedicated modders for the lack of support.
For this reason, we have officially closed GTAGarage for new mod submissions as well as new screenshots and uploads, until the launch of the new, updated system. Please note that all mods and other data will be transferred to the new system at that time, and your GTANet account and other information remains safe. GTAGarage v1 will remain open to the public so all past submissions may be freely downloaded, and will only disappear to be immediately replaced by the new system upon its launch.
Many thanks to all for your continued support of the website and community. Progress reports and other information will be posted in this news feed, along with sneak peaks at the new system. In the meantime, we will also endeavour to repair the screenshots feature.
Best of luck and happy modding!
The GTAGarage.com Team
Multi Theft Auto (MTA) have announced a preview release of MTA: San Andreas Deathmatch, a free multiplayer modification for the PC version of GTA: San Andreas. The release is aimed at community members who wish to create game modes, maps, and other resources.
"The key emphasis of this initial release is to get your help in making MTA the mod you want. We're not going to be taking feature requests - initially, but we want you to help to find bugs, create game-modes, maps, resource web pages and anything else you want! We're going to remain focused on fixing bugs until we have a release that we're happy to call a final 1.0 release."
In order to play, you require the MTA: San Andreas Deathmatch Client, which can be obtained from the Multi Theft Auto website. Dedicated servers and release notes are also available there.
GTANet has just last week moved to entirely new servers. Almost all sites have sprung back up since the move, however due to reorganisation of images & downloads, all users will find they are greeted with a 403-Forbidden error when downloading from GTAGarage. Screenshots will also return the same error, and therefore none can be viewed anywhere on the site. This error will remain in place until all files and images have been successfully transferred.
Our apologies for the inconvenience - we will be back and running as soon as we can (shouldn't be more than a few days). Please note that mod submissions will continue to be approved, but new files and screenshots are in a queue until the server move is completed.
