Build a better Multiplayer for GTA1 and 2

Well its been 2 years put off but I am finally going to get back on track with the development of a convenient multiplayer experience for Grand Theft Autos 1 and 2. I had started on some development on this back in 2003 but had put it off due to time contrains and eventually forgot about it. It is a shame though because I had wanted to create a dedicated server for people to participate and play against people across the internet.

As it stands GTADS will comprise of two components. The dedicated server that will stand as a chat/game hosting interface that players will connect on and the client, which will have the mechanisms for connecting the game to other players. The Dedicated server will be independent of the actual gameplay and GTA protocols, but will allow a Battlenet (tm) sort of interface. A player will have an account, a message inbox and a game playing record of wins and losses. The client will act as a connection to the dedicated server, allow players to connect and host games and also act as a proxy for the games. This is the meat of the what needs to be done to actually connect GTA players together in multiplayer.

I had some some early work done reverse engineering the GTA protocol to figure out what needs to be involved in the actual multiplayer. I envision a GTA player connecting their game to localhost (127.0.0.1) which will act as a proxy to connect to a game specified on the server.

This blog will attempt to chonicle my progress and let anyone who is interested know where I am at with this project. I will host this project on SourceForge.net as it will be open source. I encourage anyone whom is interested to help me take on such an endevor.

- Steven Day
GTA Developer