Grand Theft Auto Dedicated Server

My project is not dead (neither am I)

2007-07-13T16:22:00.000-05:00

It has really been a LONG while since I have even gotten to look at my blog here for GTADS. I have been working on a lot of things both business and personal and I haven't really gotten back to work on GTADS. GTADS 1.14 was supposed to be released with 2+ player support, Phalanx (the GTADS plugin) was supposed t o be getting underway and countless other plans. Right now I am in the process of securing a couple of windows machines for development while looking at where 1.14 was left off. The other developers have also been busy and this project has all but died. I will be picking up my own slack and looking to release a 1.14 release when I can. I will also be keeping an update of more things on this site finally.

I am sorry to all those who anticipated more out of the project sooner.

GTADS Lead Developer,
Steven Day

P.S. The server on Rez.fastping.net is back up but the web services aren't so you won't be able to see any servers up yet. I will be working on fixing that within the weekend.

GTADS Phalanx

2007-04-11T15:18:00.000-05:00

For the sake of simplicity, we decided to move the GTADS Phalanx project (formerly known has Global Conquest) to its own blog site. You can read all about the developments of the plug-in at http://gtadsphalanx.blogspot.com/.

Updates and Global Conquest for BR 1.15

2007-03-15T16:16:00.000-05:00

I want to start this entry with developments for 1.14. Well GTADS development had been going at a decent pace with the Server code being improved and some SQL additions to make new server user installs quick and easy. Progress has been slower on the Client end since developer availability has been limited and my recent Windows XP crash :-\. Nevertheless virtual machines should provide enough testing to get something out.

Now for the bigger news posed for the future. I will be developing a game which will use the integration of GTADS and Age of Empires to create a hybrid of a strategy based game such as Civilization with the real time battle of Age of Empires. The name of this game so far will be Global Conquest and right now it is in the planning stage. The implementation approach we are going to take is going to require a few rewrites of the current code to allow the implementation of plug-ins on both the client and server side.

We will keep you posted on developments.

Long Absence and Development

2007-03-07T17:03:00.000-05:00

February was a very busy month for me and I wasn't able to really take a look at the GTADS code and do much development on it. Its already March and it will nearly be a year since the 1.0 release of GTADS came out. I want to hope that we can get 1.14 out sooner than that and with limited machines for testing it makes it tough. GTADS has received a number of changes however including multiple chatroom support that allow any user to be in multiple rooms at the same time. In addition to that, we have new security settings in place that give the server the ability to enforce strong passwords. More bug fixes and memory problems were solved as well as our massive project to get many languages supported in our next release. I appreciate everyone's patience as we continue to develop and move on at our pace. I also ask that if anyone would like to support the project further, we will be accepting more language translations (We still need Russian) and donations are important.

Greek translations and translations on the fly

2007-01-21T19:08:00.000-05:00

Previously on GTADS if you wanted to change to another language set you would have to close the app or a window and reopen it for the language settings to propagate throughout the text. Well with the ClassRegistry project we have been working on changes to applications on the fly will be able to occur with the click of a button. Right now thanks to Ridergr from Age4Greeks our newly functioning translation system now has full Greek support. With the live system as well jumping from Greek to Norwegian is as easier as selecting which language.

Here are some screenshots of 1.14 running in Greek:

Translators needed

2007-01-20T16:59:00.000-05:00

We are coming to the stage of wrapping up everything for the new GTADS release 1.14 but we need some translations done. I set up a file that has all the English labels found in the app and all one has to do is translate what is found. I ideally want to have the following languages done for the release:

Spanish
French
German
Norwegian
Russian

Greek translations are being worked on so far. The template file can be found here and it may be subject to change from time to time but nothing major until 1.14 is released.

Rez has had a body transplant

2007-01-18T01:05:00.000-05:00

Thats right, tonight between 12am and 1am rez underwent a machine change, which consisted of me moving the hard drive from a 450mhz machine to a 1ghz machine. The machine was my old media machine and until I find a permanent machine for it, rez will remain there. I made the switch because of the very unstable hardware the 450mhz was running on. Anytime the processor was utilized heavily the machine would go into a coma with successful reboots becoming more and more random. Anyone interested in the specs of the machine:

CPU: VIA C3 Nehemiah+RNG (999.52-MHz 686-class CPU)
Origin = "CentaurHauls" Id = 0x693 Stepping = 3
Features=0x380b03d
real memory = 234815488 (223 MB)
avail memory = 220123136 (209 MB)

It is running on a VIA Mini-ITX board with everything integrated onto it. Runs very silent too :-).

What we have so far

2007-01-17T14:02:00.000-05:00

Development is still going on for GTADS. Since the holidays all of our availability has been limited but I want to share all the things we have fixed, added, and working on since 1.13.

Client Side Bug Fixes:

- Preferences Bug that didn't allow you to leave the username and password fields blank
- Made Join and Host gameroom buttons more descriptive
- Improved messaging code to remove appearance of "lag"

Client Side Finished Features:

- Added sound events
- Expanded Preferences to include Sounds and Games tabs
- Friends list shows number of friends on
- Server Browser
- First time users load up Preferences to Games tab
- Games Tab gives you the option to auto-load games
- (XP Only) Option to load up gamepaths from Registry
- Encryption login support
- Friends lists loads on startup (Optional)
- Main window and Friends list save window position
- Gameroom introduces countdown before game commences
- Code cleanup and optimization to improve performance

Client Side Features Working On:

- Autoload Game - Auto-Minimize GTADS
- Multiple players (3+) on GTADS Proxy

Server Bug Fix:

- Fixed SQL Mem Leak bug
- Fixed Messenging Code to manage users better

Server Finished Features:

- Account encryption
- Login encryption for safe login
- SQL storage option for accounts
- phpBB option for accounts
- Version checking for clients
- Smaller memory footprint
- Added tools to migrate accounts to 1.14 compat.

Online Petitions suck, here's another idea

2007-01-05T14:50:00.000-05:00

Ok I know a few of you have been bothering me about the status of the petition to open the code of GTA1 and/or GTA2. Here is what happened.

Months ago when the petition signature size reached about 1000 I printed out the sheets even though the online petition site wasn't very printer friendly, riddled with Google ads. I did the best I could to throw it up in a usable format by copying and pasting 15 pages and editing out the extra banner waste. I also threw in a link to see the petitions if anyone receiving the petition wanted to confirm its validity and so I put the link up on the header and footer of each petition page. The printable version came out to about 40 pages (margins :-) ) a hefty pack of online signatures, that I knew were half duplicates. To give the petition a little touch of humanity I appended a small but concise letter stating the reasons why openGTA would be a good idea. To this day there was no reply either by email or by regular mail. I had placed the paperwork in an envelope with my return address appended but silence is the response.

I should have realized that online petitions are a waste of time to really try to get something like this done but it was actually a good measure of how many people (divided by 2) are genuinely interested in opening the source code and doing some cool things with the oldies.

I have a new proposal that I think will make more of an impact or perhaps at least raise a few eyebrows. The internet is a bad place to express interest in doing something if that entity you are looking to influence is big company with lots of cash. We need to send Snail-mail letters to Take-Two's HQ. The power of a type written letter in an actual letter is probably at least worth 50 emails and unlike a petition it will show some sort of "face behind the mission". If we can get 50 or even 100 distinct letters sent to Rockstar I believe perhaps we can at least get a response from them.

If you do decide to write a letter, which doesn't have to be very long, it should convey your interest in the games and tell them why, in a non confrontational way, they should open the code for us. How do you think they will benefit? " We will benefit?

For anyone in North America the address for TakeTwo/Rockstar is:

Take-Two Interactive Games
622 Broadway
New York, NY 10012

For those in the UK or other parts of Western Europe:

Rockstar-North
Calton Square
1 Greenside Row
Edinburgh
Mid Lothian
Scotland
EH1 3AP

The only thing we are losing here is postage, maybe 10 minutes, and 1 sheet of printed paper.

Merry Christmas to all

2006-12-25T02:04:00.000-05:00

Everyone on the GTADS development team would like to wish everyone a Happy Christmas. We will be taking a little break and spending time with family and all that good stuff and work will resume at a later time. :-)

New Experiemental Build

2006-12-19T01:10:00.000-05:00

I know we have been working rather slowly in the last couple of weeks considering 1.14 is still not out (sorry) but we have actually been doing a lot of work in preparation. The preferences are now more fully featured and from listening to the requests of some of our users we have been working on a lot of UI stuff. I just posted a new experimental client up on the site. You can check it out to see our progress.

1.14 Delay and Win/Loss stats

2006-11-29T13:14:00.000-05:00

Hello all, back from my long absence for the holiday (Thanksgiving for those outside the US) and now we have a lot of work to do and a new sleek version of GTADS to deliver, in due time. Still setting up the server explorer and looking for a setup to get most of the stuff off of rez.fastping.net and migrated to gtads.sourceforge.net. Comboy has been helping with a lot of the server accounts code making sure that the transition is as easy as possible to the new MD5 based system. I would like to thank rider from age4greeks.gr for volunteering to help out with the greek translations for the updated manual, readme, and in application text.

Another big thing we have been working on delivering soon, game stats. We have all been pouring over countless Direct IP games of Age of Empires and GTA1 to find out what determines win/loss and I believe we may have found it. With further testing, we may have a experimental framework for stats and make GTADS competitive.

Support issues for GTADS

2006-11-15T17:19:00.000-05:00

I have been seeing a few problems with people connecting to GTADS, creating accounts, needing help getting a game going. I decided that the best way to address the issue would be to create a new mailing list for all users to post comments and issues with GTADS when no one is on the rez.fastping.net server. The email address is gtads-support@lists.sourceforge.net and it should be operational within the next 12 hours. If anyone has a problem using GTADS send an email to the specified address and you will receive a response quickly. My aim address koolaidballon is also available for anyone to ask me questions if and when I am available.

Update: Sign up to gtads-support here

Beta Release 1.14 update

2006-11-13T17:37:00.000-05:00

Well it looks like we have hit a lot of stuff for this release, which is making 1.14 a much more significant release that I have previously thought. Besides multiple players on the proxy, we are currently integrating a server browser, and an auto update system to make upgrades of small things, such as locale implementations, or more things, such bug fixes, or whole version upgrades.

There is still a lot of work to do and all we can ask for is patience and the occasional donations :-).

DirectX and WineHq

2006-11-09T16:13:00.000-05:00

I am very interested to know, since I do not possess a *nix machine with X on it, if anyone has any directX games working with Wine. If you do please contact me and let me know if you are willing to help test if GTADS can work for these games. It would be nice to set up uniform gameplay throughout various operating systems.

As for the much anticipated 1.14...

We are all working very hard on delivering a release in a timely fashion with so many necessary* features we want to throw in but make sure is correct. The most important is making the upgrade for clients and servers alike a smooth transition.

Keep on top of GTADS Development/Progress/News

2006-11-08T14:49:00.000-05:00

There are two mailing lists that anyone can subscribe to if they want to be involved or informed about GTADS News that may not make it to this site.

GTADS-Misc: Mailing List for all miscellaneous items related to GTADS such as bugs, feature requests, questions, and comments, as well as general news. It is recommended that you use this mailing list to send these things rather than emailing any of the developers directly as therer will be a better chance your question will be addressed quickly or at all.

GTADS-Devel: Developer's Mailing List. If you are interested in the development aspect of GTADS or anything that has to do with its release, this is the list. While most user end bugs should be send to the Misc list, any bugs that have to do with the actual code (i.e. "I am concerned with the code in DSChatServer on line 195") you are welcomed to throw it up on the list. All developers will be on this list but it is open to all.

GTADS getting audio

2006-11-07T03:05:00.000-05:00

Yes, it looks like this will be a reality for 1.14. One of the big problems with coming on a GTADS server and waiting for players was that if the window was minimized or in the background, 20 potential opponents would come on and leave with you realizing this 6 hours later. The work is in the early stages but should be done and in the preview releases by sometime tomorrow.

New GTADS Developers

2006-11-03T00:35:00.000-05:00

I am happy to announce that addition of 2 new developers to the GTADS team. I will introduce them by name as soon as I get their okay to but I will tell you a little bit about the help I will be getting. One developer from Greece has experience with php and mySQL and will be helping with the proxy code and mySQL side of things. The second developer comes from San Francisco and has experience with mySQL, vb.net, and a bit of java, and will start helping me with the mySQL transition for the 1.14 release as well as doing a well needed GUI face lift. Expect faster faster and more feature filled releases in the coming releases as these two get acquainted with the code base.

GTADS has broken 1000 downloads

2006-10-30T14:42:00.000-05:00

As of this morning GTADS has had a total of 1018 downloads. This includes downloads from the original 1.0 to the current 1.13 of the client, server, and source files. I am going to break down the downloads into each catergory.

Total Downloads (Since march '06):

Client: 692
Server: 261
Source: 65

Client and Server Downloads this month: 266

Client: 179
Server: 69

This is our highest downloads per month overall and I hope with 1.14's release around the corner we can get even more people to try GTADS out.

Nightly Source tarballs

2006-10-30T02:03:00.000-05:00

Well I decided that if I want help with GTADS I should make the source a little more available. I've been so busy as of late working on features to make BR 1.14 a BIG release I haven't released any bleeding edge builds yet. Just for now I will have the source code updated whenever I add new code to the CVS server. I encourage anyone who is able to grab the source code or the nightly builds when I get them up and test it out. The development server on rez.fastping.net 7001 always contains the latest development code and will be completely compatible with any new client code.

GTADS Exe files have arrived

2006-10-25T23:53:00.000-05:00

Well its not Beta Release 2.0 but its the next best thing. Now you can enjoy GTADS without having to worry about loading up any jar files whatsoever. Thanks to the jSmooth project I am able to incorporate a client executable that everyone on windows knows and loves. Under the file releases on sourceforge you can the GTADSClientWindows.zip file for this.

Rez back up, still looking for a replacement

2006-10-24T12:42:00.000-05:00

The GTADS server is back up...for now but with unstable hardware, who knows what another accidental reboot may bring. I merged the accounts created from the temporary server into the rez stable server and the development server along with it's database is also up and running. If anyone is interested in helping me out to build a better GTADS server I am looking for the following items:

- Motherboard (Anything equal or better than a Socket A board)
- A Processor depending on what motherboard I am able to acquire.
- 256 MB may or may not need to be acquired depending on the board.

Your donations help keep development active and keep the server up.

On the development side of things, things are progressing with the upcoming Beta Release 1.14. Multiple users on proxy has hit a few obstacles that are being addresses one by one, mainly with the behavior of the directplaysrv.exe but clientside items such as window position memory and the login-encryption are working beautifully.

I am looking to put up a website for GTADS to encompass general information while keeping this site reserved for development news in the coming weeks.

Indefinite Server outage

2006-10-19T12:16:00.000-05:00

Last last night rez went down, probably due to overheating, and I haven't been able to get it up. It was running on some pretty dated hardware and it was probably only a matter of time. For the time being the server has been moved to my desktop and may not have persistent uptime. I am looking for some cheap hardware to utilize for a rez such as a used board, minimal ram and a decent CPU. This is where your donations can really come in. It will really speed up GTADS development if I can test items on a separate server and keep the rez server running for most people just wanting to hit the default server. Also a lot of web based features cannot be realized without having a second physical machine. Every dollar can help to make this next release happen.

Encryption coming to GTADS

2006-10-18T16:14:00.000-05:00

Well i decided that as part of the release there could and should encryption for the logins. I have been holding off on this for a while because I didn't see it as necessary but for admins hosting the server at the very least this will be handy. The new implementation is on the test server and the client will be available via CVS to check out if curious. I am working on plaintext backwards compatibility so that newer clients can still interact with older version servers.

Encryption works something like this:

- Logging into Server, Server provides you with a timekey:
SERVER,0,LOGIN,AUTHENTICATE,1161205402469
the time key is just the date in milliseconds.

- Client uses md5(timeKey + md5(password))
admin,0,LOGIN,5880cfa25c894bd051183179b0ffad74

- Server authenticates sent hash with timeKey and the md5 password it has
in its password cache.
SERVER,0,LOGIN,LOGINSUCCESS

This ensures that upon login that it would be extremely hard to decode the MD5 password out of the redundant md5 hash and getting the right timeKey and plus administrators will never know your password.

Multiple Players and a name change in GTADS

2006-10-06T00:31:00.000-05:00

Well as you may have seen in the previous posts GTADS development has been pretty busy. I haven't checked in any of the new code in the CVS server yet but I will as soon as I finish up the core features. Right now development is being done on the game proxy to support multiple players. With this, users will be able to transparently host games that are more than 1v1. This means the possiblility of 4 player GTA1 and 6-8 player Age of Empire games.

Also since GTADS is no longer exclusively a GTA driven application I am looking to gradually (It really won't be overnight) change the name to something that best describes the application. I haven't really made this a priority because I don't see it as being as important as getting the application functional. If anyone would like to suggest a name, please email me and briefly explain why.

Just as a side note a live serverlist can be retrieved here.

Run a forum? Integrate with GTADS

2006-10-03T22:54:00.000-05:00

I am adding a new feature that site owners can utilize. Integrating their user accounts on their content management sites and forums such as phpBB and phpNuke will allow the server to use this account data for users to log in rather than have users recreate accounts and having two separate account stores. This will be ready in the 1.14 Beta Release, which I am working hard to bring a lot of things that should have been in 1.13. The only requirement to implement this once it is out is to have your mySQL database accessible from the GTADS server, know the tablename and fields and make sure the passwords are encrypted with MD5. If there any forums or CMS systems that use any other method (SHA? etc) please let me know so I can add these options for this release.

The Greeks have Invaded!

2006-10-02T14:16:00.000-05:00

Well not really but now we have a Greek AOE presence in Age of Empires. Age4Greeks has decided to bring up its own GTADS server dedicated to all things Age of Empires (Especially the Conquerors expansion). I have been working with the site administrator to get things going especially in terms of Greek translations, and themes. As soon as their server has a permanent host name I will throw it up here for anyone to check out. There is still no word from Sun about their JVM problem while loading up any directX game and it looks like I am going to have to load up a workaround. I would like to thank Age4Greeks for their interest in my project. This is what GTADS is all about, choice.

Update:

The server is aoc-battleground.no-ip.org:7001 meaning it is aoc-battleground.no-ip.org on port 7001.

Developers wanted

2006-09-29T14:28:00.000-05:00

I'm looking for a Java developer to help me work on the GUI redesign, incorporating themes/images and moving the code base to JDK 1.5. If anyone with novice to intermediate skill would like to help email me (steven dot day at gmail dot com). I am not an expert java coder and I don't mind having anyone help who would like to use this as a learning experience and so on.

Other items that need work if anyone wants to pick up some of the code slack

- Throwing in all countries into Countries dropdown in preferences
- Displaying Country in chatroom list
- Wildcards on IP banning feature
- Moving gameroom list on main chat window
- Adding timestamp for last time logged in and last ip address in accounts file

I'll be working on these plus tons of other things. Hope to have the help.

Beta Release 1.13 GO GO GO!

2006-09-28T22:50:00.000-05:00

Implementing NAT safe gaming was something I couldn't leave waiting for later. I decided to release 1.13 with this change and save the rest of the developments for 1.13a or 1.14. So everyone update and don't worry about opening any proxy ports UNLESS you want to host. You will not be able to host without forwarding your proxy port but now it will be less of a hassle.

NAT Safe games

2006-09-28T00:18:00.000-05:00

Well it has been successfully tested and has been placed on CVS, I have given users the ability to play games through GTADS WITHOUT having the port forward. This will make a lot of people's lives easier, especially thouse who can't control their firewall or proxy. I am still testing this feature and am looking to see how much performance would change if at all. People who want to host will still need to forward their ports but this may make the experience much easier.

Other Items:

- Multiple Players under GTADS
- Voice Chat
- Stats

Unexpected Server outage

2006-09-23T17:33:00.000-05:00

Rez was hit with a small power outage for about an hour today, I apologize for this as the circuit seems to have gotten overloaded. Looking to get a UPS for rez to keep it up and going if this happens again.

Playing on GTADS without port forwarding?

2006-09-22T16:14:00.000-05:00

That's right, I thought it over and I think I will be implementing a NAT friendly proxy for GTADS players. This will allow users to only join games but anyone interested in hosting will still need to open their proxy port. While this isn't implemented yet I do warn that the in using 1 port traffic it is still recommended that you would open your proxy port for optimal game play. Users may experience a little extra lag against players who do not have their proxy port forwarded. I also wouldn't advice voice chat off of these sessions but some more testing will confirm how much performance is affected. This should be in development within a couple of days and featured in Release 1.13.

Client Interface Suggestions

2006-09-19T15:02:00.000-05:00

I am looking for suggestions for the client interface. Tell me what you think should be implemented/fixed/improved on the GTADS client. You can email me these at steven dot day at gmail dot com or leave a comment on this page. A lot of things are happening behind the scenes to get more games and a better gameplay experience but I would like to know what the users think would make GTADS better and more usable in their opinions.

GTADS Video Issue and Voice Chat

2006-09-10T22:12:00.000-05:00

Anyone who may have tried GTADS from the beginning may have run into a shitty bug that plagues the Java Virtual Machine. If you run the client then open GTA1 or Age of Empires the client may close out and crash inexplicably. I have filed a bug report with Sun to try to resolve the issue in a later release of their JRE. For now here is a quick and dirty workaround to opening the game sans the crashing. Before you open your game of choice Minimize all windows of GTADS. This is important, you must minimize the windows to avoid crashing, If you decide to alt-tab out of the game and go into GTADS switching back and forth won't affect it from that point on.

Also the codebase is getting its groundbreaking voice chat features implemented as of tonight. The change may be in the CVS repository later on in the week. There may be a lot of testing before this gets thrown into a new release.

And please if you know of a forum or a website that caters to a GTA1 or Age of Empires community, let them know about this project. Many people have come on and enjoyed it. If we can get more players we can make it even more enjoyable.

Beta Release 1.12: More additions

2006-09-06T22:31:00.000-05:00

These days there seems to be a lot more development going into GTADS and with good reason. I added a few bug fixed and features to the 1.12 release for both the client and server. The gameroom now shows when a game has actually been started and when the game is finished. Also added some gameroom labels for Age of Empires: Rise of Rome, Age of Empires 2, etc. Check it out.

Accounts on GTADS Server rez.fastping.net

2006-09-06T15:54:00.000-05:00

The accounts repository was accidentally over written while moving the server from 1.1 to 1.11. I managed to retrieve a local copy of the accounts file prior to the first time it was over written during the 1.0 release. If you may have had an account prior to 1.0 and have forgotten it, please let me know so that I may delete your account and let you recreate your login. I Apologize for the inconvenience.

AOE II Confirmed and GTADS for the future

2006-09-01T11:24:00.000-05:00

Well as 1.11 made its release a few Age of Empire fans have come on and tried it out with successes. It is always good to get the interest of people for your software and in addition have feedback come in. Taking in the feedback I know what definitely needs to be done for Beta Release 1.12. Age of Empires II does work though there seems to be a proxy issue that doesn't allow the proxy to work properly after successfully playing a game. That will be fixed shortly but the main criticism is the complexity of setting a game up. I know when GTADS was first set up there was more function in mind than ease of use. Now that I can say the proxy definitely works on GTA and Age of Empires I think its time to revamp the interface on the proxy to make setting up a game more streamlined. If anyone has any suggestions on what should be done, don't hesistate to send an email that I will definitely consider it.

I am also looking to put up a complete website for this project and need help in setting one up. I don't have the time or effort to do it myself but I am looking for someone willing to help me out to set one up. The site would be hosted on http://gtads.sourceforge.net/.

Age of Empires II Unconfirmed

2006-08-30T01:16:00.000-05:00

Well it looks like AOE 2: Age of Kings may infact work with Beta Release 1.1. I had attempted to do a game with the Virtual Machine however since too many things were running i didn't get to successfully explore it. The game did infact connect and this seems very promising. If you have Age of Empires II please try to test with friends if it does in fact work. You may use the Age of Empires game type.

Beta Release 1.11: Age of Empires and JVM Issue

2006-08-29T22:32:00.000-05:00

Hey it finally happened, after a week of trying to figure out the problem Age of Empires now works with GTADS. If anyone cares to know, the issue was the buffer size for incoming proxy packets was too small for the huge data dump AOE would send to the client. This has all been fixed and Beta Release 1.11 reflects these changes. Unfortunately, unlike what I had previously though, Twisted Metal and even Age of Empires 2 does not currently work with the configuration. I suspect that different DirectX versions have upgrades to the protocol that aren't compatible with one another and that GTADS's proxy works on a DirectX 4/5 level. Never the less this is great news for all those AOE fans, especially with MS Zone being done away with. I'm looking forward to working on and adding games using a higher DirectX version soon but AOE will for now. If you are interested in playing AOE please upgrade your client to Beta Release 1.11, otherwise you may keep your 1.1 version to play GTA1/London as normal.

NOTE: This has been a minor annoyance on GTA1 and doesn't happen everytime but for players of Age of Empires, please START UP your game first before starting up the GTADS client. If you start up the client and then the game the client will crash. I am waiting on word for Sun as to why the JVM crashes when either GTA1 or most definitely Age of Empires runs. If you have the game open you can ALT-TAB out of the game then run the client. GTA1 users may want to do this also to avoid the client crashing as well.

Enjoy!

GTADS Server Discovery

2006-08-21T01:15:00.000-05:00

Anyone who has taken a look at the configuration file in the GTADS server since version 1.0 may have noticed a unused parameter in the file named publish. This was something I had thought about from the very beginning and is probably a necessity for something with multiple servers. began writing the GTADS server discovery cgi scripts. This way if anyone wants to put up a server there will be a url that you can send them to and have them displayed for others to see. The scripts (when ready) will also be released under the BSD license and packaged with the GTADS server and source code.

As for an update of other things. I have been focusing more on the server and proxy in terms of making the server side of things more efficient as well as bring in the addition of more games to GTADS. Depending on how much stuff I get done on the Server there may be a Beta Release 1.11 for the Server.

Age of Empires, Twisted Metal, etc and so on

2006-08-16T01:10:00.000-05:00

Just getting through with releasing a freshly updated GTADS is something I am proud of accomplishing. I have been getting positive feedback on the interface and features. So although it gives me a little time to rest from coding, there is still much work to be done for the next release. Right now, I am packet sniffing game traffic from many of the Age of Empire games. I really want to get a few RTS games working on here, especially the old favorites people love to play. Also getting the proxy to become AOE compatible will also make it compatible with most DirectPlay games bringing the list to maybe hundreds of titles. There is still the language translations to get working as well. Still stalled on populating that file but with enough help I should get it internationalized. As I have done before I won't make any promises on releases because my schedule can be pretty hectic but before this next release gets hammered out, Age of Empires will at the least be playable over GTADS.

Router Guide

2006-08-14T14:07:00.000-05:00

I'm happy to see a lot more people taking interest in GTADS since I released Beta 1.1. We have had over 25 downloads so far and I have played a few games with people eager to see what it can do. One problem which has been brought to people's attention because of the proxy check feature is the opening of ports. Most people when logging on will see the error message stating that their proxy port is not open and that they will have to go into their routers. I've had to step a few people through getting their routers open so that they would be able to play GTA1 or London but I found a guide that will have most models listed for how to foward ports. Anyone looking for how to forward their ports may look at http://www.portforward.com/english/routers/port_forwarding/routerindex.htm for specific information. I will post the link on the side menu and hopefully this will get people going a lot faster.

New Release PLEASE UPDATE

2006-08-13T00:05:00.000-05:00

Well I am happy to announce that Beta Release 1.1 is finally done and has the following features:

- New color scheme on Client
- Support for GTA: London
- New ban admin management
- Server recordable pingtimes
- Bind IP Function
- Gameroom announces whom connects to proxy
- Preferences
- Multi language support (Not Finished)
- Fixed uptime bug post 24 days
- Proxy Port check in beginning

I am going to replace the GTADS Server on 7001 with the new server code. Please upgrade your clients accordingly.

New Theme for GTADS (Soon to be Modifiable)

2006-08-11T11:46:00.000-05:00

Well the first steps of stylizing GTADS has begun. I started coloring and theming GTADS with some initial work on the Main Chat window and the creation. Here is a preview of it:

GTA London

2006-08-06T18:42:00.000-05:00

I was finally able to try out GTADS with GTA: London 1969 and I am happy to say that it is 100% compatible with the GTADS Proxy. There have been a few other enhancements in the code to make this release much easier to use. I think to make the most of this 1.1 release I will postpone it while I fix minor things. Shouldn't be more than a few days.

WhatismyIP? New IP Bind Function

2006-07-31T17:02:00.000-05:00

Messing with peer to peer over the internet these days can be a pain in the arse. For example if I want to play someone over the internet with my GTADS Client I will have to make sure my router/firewall are set to route the proxy port. In addition there are certain cases when the IP address the server knows is different from the IP address you want or can use the proxy on. As an example, the rez server resides on my LAN. As a matter of fact is is below my feet chugging away. When I connect to the server the server records my IP address as 172.16.18.4 not the internet address that people would use to connect to me. This may be a special case but for others who are on the server with multiple networks or would just like to bind their IP to a specific address there is a bind IP function in the create game window. This has been there for some time but I went the extra step to make things easier for those who need to bind an IP. When you grab the new client friday you will notice a Get IP button on the right of the IP Field. Using "whatismyipaddress.com" I have created a small web utility to just instantly grab the external IP address. This way if one doesn't know their IP address off hand and they may just retrieve it quickly and easily from this method.

Beta Release 1.1

2006-07-30T23:33:00.000-05:00

Well, going over the code today I realized a few things that can and can't be done for the 1.1 release. The work on adding multiple players for GTA will have to wait until I get some test machines to work from. For now it will still be 2 player GTA1 available to play on the GTADS. There are also some much needed improvements that have been sitting in the code waiting for release. For example, configurable preferences have made it, with the option to have a preset username and password in the login screen, timestamps, and the ability to change your default chatroom. There will be a full log of release changes when GTADS BR 1.1 is offically released, which is set for the week of August 4th.

My Absence

2006-07-18T11:22:00.000-05:00

I apologize for my absence for the last couple of weeks and the lack of any sort of updates on GTADS. Unfortunately I haven't made much progress on GTADS, as I have been busy with things in the professional world. The project is by no means dead though, things have just been put on pause. Test machines aside I will be working on the things I have last left everything at (3-4 GTA1 players at a time, language settings, etc). I am happy to say that I have a collective 201 accounts on the GTADS server. I have popped in to the server to see how everything is going and I do see people playing from time to time and see this as a good thing. As I am usually bad with deadlines I won't give you a date for the Beta Release 1.1 but I will keep this blog posted with progress leading up to the release.

Update on BR 1.1

2006-05-24T09:56:00.000-05:00

Its been about 2 months since the 1.0 release and I know with the emails and IMs I get that everyone wants to know whats up with 1.1? Well, if you've missed the last couple of posts, the machines I use to test the game play over the proxy died and I haven't had the money to replace them as of yet. I did however recently build a virtual machine of windows 2000 to do some testing with. So as of now, I am fixing anything holding back multiple players on GTA1 as well as making the proceedure a little use friendlier.

Petition going out this week

2006-05-17T09:53:00.000-05:00

Well I would like to thank everyone who took their time out to post on the openGTA petition. We are up to 427 and I think this is enough so far to send to rockstar and show our support for open sourcing GTA 1 & 2. I will be sending an email sometime this week in addition to a hardcopy letter with a printout of the petition to Rockstar and I will keep you all posted on their reply.

Happy Birthday GTADS

2006-05-13T13:07:00.000-05:00

Well 1 year ago on May 13th I wrote in the first lines of code for GTADS Server. Now after a year it has grown into something useable and stable. It's been a long year of development and I really wanted to get 1.1 out by today but since my machines decided to go hang themselves, i'll have to wait. Lets hope that this coming year brings even more exciting things in GTADS, such as stats, more games, voice chat, and some actual users.

Disaster Strikes and 1.1 update

2006-05-10T10:37:00.000-05:00

For about a half an hour this morning rez and everything else went down crashing. A power failure killed everything and anything plugged in. Rez had to be nursed back up because of some filesystem checks, wasn't pretty. Everything should be working fine now, though.

If you haven't done so please: Sign The OpenGTA petition

It can only help the GTA modding community.

lets reach 500 signatures

2006-05-08T11:42:00.000-05:00

As I am writing this entry, there are 325 signatures on the petition. By the end of this week I will print these sheets out, and send out a print copy of the petition as well as a letter requesting that the source code be opened. I will also email them and link the petition site to whoever deals with these matters at rockstar. The more signatures we get, the more support we show. While this may or may not work, it is always worth a try and 10 seconds of your time to sign.

...Now on to more immediate concerns :-)

I am trying to get GTADS Br 1.1 out as soon as possible despite the apparent hurdles i'm facing such as lack of machines to test multiplayer. Language translations is also another thing i'd like to incorporate but, may end up being rendered using translation tools. The main thing is confirming the GTA 3-4 player proxy works and we should see a easier, slightly user friendlier, release.

A Humble call for donations

2006-05-07T17:08:00.000-05:00

Hey all, you know the saying bad things happen in groups. Well it seems things have been slightly unfortunate for me. My only test PC has died as well as my laptop and this means that proxy testing has become 10 times more impossible. Especially with the addition of Twisted Metal 2 and GTA1 3-4 player. I am asking anyone who is intererested in this project continuing to please try to help me in anyway possible to complete my release. This is in no way obligatory but if there is anyway you'd like to help me complete this release, I would be greatly appreciative. The donate button is on the left if you would like to help me raise money for some new components for the test PC or if anyone has any spare parts that won't be missed you can email me at steven dot day at gmail dot com and I can give you details of what you can do.

Thank you in advance.

Is this IRC?

2006-05-07T01:19:00.000-05:00

Upon coming back to see what was going on, on the server I stumbled upon this:

[05:55:33] IRC....
[05:55:40] THIS IS IRC ISN'T IT
[05:55:41] HAHA
[05:55:42] BUSTED
[05:57:25] I r connecting
[06:00:40] *lilkev2k6 has left chatroom

haha, if this was an IRC hack, I definitely don't think it would have taken as long as it did to release the client, the server, and the proxy. Its true GTADS has a lot of IRC qualities and IRC is a good model to follow for chat but no the server is in no way related to IRC, in the protocol, the structure, or anything. "BUSTED" for what? even if it was, if it provides game play it really shouldn't matter. Anyway it is still good to see people coming on the server and I hope people like lilkev2k6 realize that, GTADS isn't an irc server with some weird hacks to make it appear like a game server.

100 Signatures and rising

2006-04-30T16:11:00.000-05:00

I am happy to see the overwhelming responses for OpenGTA on the online petition. It shows that there is a strong modding community that does want to benefit from the source code of the game. I have to thank drwbns who comes on rez from time to time for putting forth the idea and everyone who posted the petition on their own GTA websites, including Sektor. I am looking for a target of at least 1000 signatures before I go and bring this before Rockstar so if any of you reading this has anyone who would like the idea of OpenGTA redirect them to the petition, it only takes a second. Comments do help and show your opinion that this is what we really do want.

Thanks Everyone, keep up the good work.

OpenGTA petition

2006-04-28T12:41:00.000-05:00

I got this idea from a GTADS user who thought it would be beneficial to have Rockstar open the source code of their old but enjoyable games, GTA1 and 2. I set up an online petition for people to go to and sign so that when I present this to rockstar they will know that the petition had the support of many, not just one or two points of view. I believe that the GTA modding community would benefit from the game being released open source and that those people will contribute back to GTA1 and 2. It is worth a shot and the worst that can happen is a generic form letter saying "No".

If you are interested in signing the petition to Open GTA1&2 Click the link below and sign up. I'll keep the petition going for 2 weeks before going to rockstar with it:

http://www.petitiononline.com/opengta/petition.html

Release Date for Beta R 1.1

2006-04-28T10:10:00.000-05:00

With the progress we've been making in developing the 1.1 code, I feel confident that we will be able to release by Early May, target date May 5th. If you haven't tried to experimental client, these are the most notable features coming in 1.1:

- Checks if Proxy Port is open
- Configurable Preferences
- Multi Language Support
- Extra commands
- GTA1 with 3 and 4 players

The other stuff we are working on may not make it into the new release but these are the definite features to look forward to.

Also it has come to my attention from a user who's had a problem with their GTADS client that you should not use GTADS with a resolution smaller than 1024x768. The chat window is too wide and some of the components on the left did not show up correctly. Also make sure you have the latest Java JRE. It minimized the chance of something breaking.

Downtime and more Downtime

2006-04-26T13:26:00.000-05:00

Apologies for the spotty service on the rez.fastping.net server. The ISP is experiencing technical difficulties and as soon as that clears up the server should be accessible again. I am actively looking to get the server hosted somewhere more reliable but its difficult to do so since most cohosting companies don't recognize port 7000 as a legitimate service port. Perhaps in the future when we can get clustering going this will be a semi-transparent issue.

Feature requests and suggestions

2006-04-24T10:27:00.000-05:00

I know over the past month or so I have been getting people sign on and suggest things about GTADS for the 1.1 release. Some have reported problems and just told me in the chat, but would sign on a second later. I cannot fix problems or talk about features if no one stays on long enough for it. If you guys have bugs or feature requests, I strongly encourage you to visit the sourceforge site and post on the feature requests page. For the time being, I will try to address some of the issues i've seen sent to me via IM or chatroom.

Issue #1:

> I can't see the user list on the side when I log in!

I would really like to help out in the problem yet I cannot ever seem to reach that person but if they are reading this right now here are some questions to think about:

- Are you running the latest version of the client? Beta Release 1.1?
- Does it happen everytime you log in?
- What happens if you move to another chatroom or rejoin #GTADS?

Issue #2:

> ...right clicking someone's name should show them the location and their ping... down to a state level...

Right now peer to peer pings are out of the question. Java doesn't support ICMP and users do not have access to other user's ip addresses except in the gameroom. This may change in the future but that's the current state of things. Also, country locales are on the feature request page and is actively being worked on. There is no plan to set it to a state level being that it is tedious and as far as GTA1 is concerned doesn't give a clear indication of how latency will suffer. I've played 4 different people from the west coast (I live in New York) and have had pings of 50-100ms. I have also played people locally in NYC and have had terrible pings. Moving everything to a state level would be tedious and a waste of time. A concession I may make for large countries however is partitioning a country. US - West, US - East, US-Mid may be an easier compromise.

Issue #3:

> Gameplay is too hard using GTADS, having to open the port, create a gameroom, and the proxy routine...

This I agree is a small problem with GTADS. It has more to do with the proxy than the routine of opening ports of creating gamerooms. This is being worked on in version 1.1 but for the time being if you have any trouble with the routine, the GTADS manual, should be able to help you out for the time being. Its a beta.

Please take any other issues through a method where I will be able to respond to you from it or it won't be taken seriously. A bug needs to be reproduced, a feature needs to be understood and i'm not in the business of tracking anyone down to discuss.

129 Downloads and counting

2006-04-17T10:42:00.000-05:00

After approximately a month after its inception I am happy to announce that we have had a total of 129 downloads of GTADS. The Statistics are as follows:

GTADS Client: 66 Downloads
GTADS Server: 49 Downloads
GTADS Source Code: 14 Downloads

Again I am happy to see that number for such a new and unrefined project of mine. I realize there is a long way to go with the GTADS stuff and we are aggressively trying to push a release out as soon as possible.

I would also like to take the time to welcome a new developer to the GTADS team, James Blocker. He will be mainly focusing on improving the UI (God knows it needs a face lift) as was as various other clientside areas and is helping on the 1.1 release.

P.S We still need translators. Spanish, German, French, and Portuguese translators. I don't trust the automated translation tools.

GTADS Goes international

2006-04-13T02:46:00.000-05:00

Well thats not really news considering most of the people who connect to my site and to the server are from Europe and Australia, but I mean international in a different way. I am happy to introduce language translations into GTADS starting with the future release of 1.1. Here is a screen shot of the client screen under the spanish setting.

I am not a spanish speaker and my translations came from the Google translator, which brings me to my second point of needing translators. Anyone can help just by looking at whatever is written in English on GTADS and converting it to whichever language of preference. This will make it easier and more comfortable for everyone to use GTADS.

GTADS Br 1.1 update

2006-04-12T09:59:00.000-05:00

well its about to be a month since the first beta of GTADS was released. It has had some curious faces come by and check the server out, it has had some bugs, and most of all it has had some successful games played. It seems the biggest hurdle in GTADS is getting people on the server and staying and waiting for others to come and play. Another is the logistics of setting up a game and access to documentation. It is necessary for both players to have the UDP port 8000 open for both the host and the connector. It may chance in the future but this is how it works now. GTA1 uses a range of ports from 2300-2400 TCP and UDP as well as the DirectPlay helper ports on 47624 tcp/udp. To me 1 port doesn't seem very trouble some given that. I urge anyone interested in playing GTADS, to join in pairs and to play each other. The server won't self populate and when looking for someone to play, at least for the beginning, will need this sort of intervention.

Now to GTADS Br 1.1. Many of the features we are working towards in 1.1 is to make the interface and administration the program easier to navigate around. for example, a preferences setting for the client will make the program more flexible and user friend. For administrators, the ability to ban users and ip addresses is already completed and giving users privilages is on its way.
On the game side, the GTA1 proxy will facilitate more than 2 players, allowing up to the game limit of 4 players. Those of you who have been querying voice chat, unfortunately if it does make it as a feature, it will not be brought into 1.1.

You can see all the progress of the progress at the feature request listing on sourceforge and you may also add your own suggestions. Before you add one however, make sure it is well thought out, is not a duplicate idea, one that being developed, and keep it civil. Flamebait posts and stupid questions will be ignored and deleted.

FreeBSD Server

2006-04-09T01:07:00.000-05:00

Well rez.fastping.net has just been moved over to a FreeBSD machine only a few minutes ago. The need to move the server over was one that needed to be done a long time ago but needed a hard drive to make the transition over. With the news that FreeBSD now has official sun compiled java binaries for both their JDK and JRE made the process a must. For any one who has an account on rez right now, all account data, and friendslists have been moved over.

The server is a AMD K7 550 Mhz PC with 256 MB system memory.
The hard drive is a 14GB Maxtor I am hoping to move over to scsi soon enough.

This is also a note to anyone who wants to run a server. It does take well to FreeBSD once the JRE is installed.

Donations to GTADS

2006-04-07T10:13:00.000-05:00

You guys may have noticed that there is a mysterious new button lingering on this site now. Well, not all that mysterious but its looking at you. Yes, GTADS is looking for donations to fund things like games to work on and server hardware to host our test server on right now. We currently pay whatever littles costs we have out of pocket and with GTA and GTA2 being free, that made it extra easy to work on without running out and getting those games. Though I have confirmation that the GTADS client and server work on Mac OS X, Linux, and FreeBSD as it should under java I haven't been able to do testing for those platforms and perhaps support games compatible with those platforms. We don't run server clusters (not yet ;-)) or run a USD 10,000 a month electricity bill so i don't expect any donations to be only $10.

As far as development goes, we are getting ready to get Beta Release 1.1 out and have about 8-10 items on our list to complete before it's ready. Many of these changes are enhancements server administration, proxy code cleanup, and some gradual UI redesign. Remember, the latest code is always in the CVS, and the latest or nearest to latest builds are under the "Experimental Downloads" on the right of the page.

Latest Developments on GTADS

2006-04-03T12:45:00.000-05:00

Every since Beta Release 1 kicked off we've been working on getting Beta Release 1.1 up and out with a wide variety of fixes. There has also been a few features that have been marked for future releases if you look on the Feature Request page on our Sourceforge homepage. One of the biggest projects for the future working towards Beta Release 2 is getting voice chat operational. You may have already figured out that was in the works from the change in the poll last week.
Another goody that has been decided maybe 15 minutes ago is our second game we are going to support will be DooM Legacy. Its an open source port of doom that only needs the .wad game files to play and this will allow fans of Doom to join the fans of GTA1 on the server and set up games. We're not entirely sure when or what release the Doom proxy support will be added but what is certain right now is it will be added.

To check out Doom Legacy check out: http://sourceforge.net/projects/doomlegacy/

Beta/Development Server back up

2006-03-30T01:15:00.000-05:00

The Development server is back up on rez.fastping.net on port 7001 and is accessible from the outside now. This server will incorporate the latest working CVS code and is not recommended for anything beyond testing. The game play server is still on port 7000 and that one will remain open for anyone to use with the Beta Release 1 client while the development server will be used with the experimental clients based on the latest code in the CVS repository.

If anyone interested in testing the CVS code would like to be updated on what is added into the development client/server they may check the sourceforge site's feature requests and bug reports. Right now changes in the development code will reflect what will be in Beta Release 1.1.

Server Documentation up

2006-03-28T12:27:00.000-05:00

On the same documentation site, the server documentation information has been appended. It should give anyone wanting to host and admin their own server a good step by step guide to the aspects of getting one going for beta release 1. For each future release of GTADS corresponding documentation will be included in the zip file for convenience as well as the internet repository.
I have become aware, as most programmers never realize, that the GTADS gaming sequence isn't as easy as it should be. A lot of people want to get on and game, and find themselves dealing an interface that is less than ideal. That is one of the major things being worked on to make game play a bit better and more fluid for anyone do. If anyone has played a game on the rez server, i urge you to help out any new comers on the server and to point them to the documentation.

New Beta Server

2006-03-25T21:04:00.000-05:00

Ok new that Beta Release 1 has been out for a little more than a week, a lot of development has begin for the next minor release 1.1. Version 1.1 will add some changes to the interface, as well as fixing nasty server errors i've captured. The new Beta Server will be run on rez.fastping.net on port 7001. The FPN GTADS Server will remain on port 7000. For a little while, maybe a week, the beta server will be closed for internal testing before the port is open for the outside world.
A few things to look for in the 1.1 release:

- Fix null pointer exceptions that affect other users on the server
- Keep chatwindow open on disconnects
- Make gameroom creation easier
- Bind IP Address option on game room creation

Calling all servers! (if any...)

2006-03-23T11:48:00.000-05:00

Well its been exactly a week since I released and thinks seem to be going alright. As of today our download statistics have been:

GTADS Client: 17 Downloads
GTADS Server: 8 Downloads
GTADS Source Code: 2 Downloads

I think its a good start and it shows some people not only have interest in playing but also hosting their own. There have also been a handful of games played through GTADS and some positive feedback. That being said, i'd like to know if anyone hosting a server has successfully got it going, and would like to have it listed on here. Things will definitely be more dynamic and streamlined when the server publisher is operational.

One last thing if you are at all interested in getting more people on GTADS please spread the word. Being an open source spare time project I don't have the time nor money (mostly money) to advertise the product all over the internet. Besides a friend's recommendation is much better than a banner or web posting. Invite your friends to use GTADS.

Documentation, a Website, and Release 2

2006-03-20T14:09:00.000-05:00

Well I am happy that GTADS is going through its first week as a freely released product. There were a few bumps in the release and a few quick fixes that needed to be made but besides that it's really well. I'd like to thank all the people who supported the project and stayed with seeing it all the way through.
The first thing I want to discuss on the is documentation. I am currently creating GTADS documentation on using the client and server. It is about 50% done and writing a guide for using the server is what is really left. You can check out the documentation at http://gtads.sourceforge.net/docs/ and consult it if you have any questions in using GTADS to play GTA1.
I'd also like to mention that GTADS will officially have a site in the next couple of weeks. A friend of mine and GTA1 ethusiast will help me design an official site while leaving this as a developer's blog. So this site will be up but for more developer specific comments and news.
With that being said I also want to add that that Beta Release 2 is schedules to be released on the 26th. A few things that will definitely be fixed/added upon are:

- Option to Bind IP when hosting a game
- Letting the gameroom know that a request packet has been recieved via host proxy
- New User dialog bug
- /ban User or IP command
- Displaying creator of a gameroom and status

Things I want to add but may not make it into Beta Release 2:

- User control for gameroom
- 2+ player GTA
- GTA2 support

Important things to keep in mind on GTADS

2006-03-17T11:10:00.000-05:00

- Whether you're hosting or joining a game, in order for gameplay to work you must have port 8000 (UDP) open on your computer and router.
- When setting an ip address in the actually game, Please make sure you put in 127.0.0.1 or localhost. The proxy routes the GTA traffic from localhost and across the proxy.
- If the game doesn't connect the first time, both the joiner and the host should just restart their proxies, check ports (personal firewalls), and their network connection. Right now the proxy operates on UDP with no packet confirmation. Over laggy or unstable connections some of these packets may never reach their destinations.
- Try to play someone in your region. Its recommended that any ping value less than 150ms should be a good indicator or someone who's in your country. I've personally had decent games with people who live about 3000 miles away and had 90-100ms latency.
- Special note for people who are hosting their own servers on their lan. You guys will most likely connect locally to the GTADS server and as such the server will only record your local ip address. If you decide to host a game the server will auto enter your local IP into their proxy. In the next release special cases like this will be handled by an optional "Force IP to...". A work around now is to either let the player know to change the ip address before they press start on the proxy or just let an external player host.

1 Day past schedule but here we go

2006-03-16T14:11:00.000-05:00

Ok guys, I finally released the first beta version of GTADS that I think is useable for people. It took a lot of time and hard work to get the last parts of the client, server, and proxy done and I hope you guys enjoy. Since the project has been abd must be released on SourceForge's system I will provide a link to the downloads page there. The beta links will remain as those will be the lastest versions of what I'm working on. As for the Beta server, that will be changed to a new address soon as the current server on rez.fastping.net is a fastping.net server now (Same computer just a change in the affiliation).

Now I don't have any time today to release documentation so I will try to get all the relavant parts out as much as possible on this post. As of this release you can play GTA1 2 player games. You will need to OPEN port 8000 UDP on your computers in order for the proxy to function. Those of you with personal firewalls you will need to allow java.exe or javaw.exe to use that port.

Step by Step Guide to getting a game going:

- When you load up the client make the server drop down is on "rez.fastping.net". If you have never made an account on that server you can click the New User button and create your own username and password.
- Once logged in you will see a chatroom and above that buttons that say Join Game and Host Game. If you want to create a game you must click on Host Game. If you have a friend that has created a game you can go click Join Game find his game and connect.
- Once you join your friends game or have set up your hosted game you will be in another smaller chatroom interface. This is the gameroom window. When your friend and you are ready to play whoever is hosting (Whoever started the game) must click Start Proxy. Once the proxy is started for both players you should allow 30 seconds to a minute for the host to set up their game and Gather a network. Once you are sure their game is started and hosting you can load up your own copy of GTA1 and Join Network. It is important to note when the game asks you for an IP Address you should put in 127.0.0.1 or localhost to connect to the proxy.
- The game should connect and you and your opponent should be playing.
- If anything doesn't work correctly you can restart the proxy. The host should stop the proxy and the player as well. Letting the host start the proxy first, the procedure should be repeated again.

Again this is BETA software, and you probably will find some sort of bugs. Please email me if you find anything as I am still working on the GTADS code working towards a 1.0 release.

If you are wondering what is coming:

Client:
Redesign of interface for many windows
Better Gameroom game initialization
configuation file
sounds and graphics (optional by configuration)
Admin commands

Server:
Code clean up
Ban management
Multiple Admin support
SQL Support
Website publishing interface
Stats Management
Admin commands

Proxy:
4 player support for GTA1
Support for GTA2 (6 players)
Support for Twisted Metal 2 (4 players)
Support for Doom (4 players)
Stats management

Release Delay

2006-03-14T10:49:00.000-05:00

I underestimated the work i'd have to do for GTADS and it looks like i'm going to need a few more days to get it in. The Gameroom stuff, some more server admin, and some loose ends that need polishing. Check back here for when its done. Sorry :-(

A March 15th Release Target

2006-03-10T11:03:00.000-05:00

Well GTADS has been on the worktable for a long long time, getting created a little at a time (as my free time permits) and its about time for an official release to come out. I am targeting a March 15th release date because I want people to be able to use and check out where GTADS is right now. I doesn't have everything I wanted to incorporate into the server and client but if I do that it will never be released (there are always cool things you want to add). The last few things I need to finish up before the release are the following:

- Create gameroom, gameroom list window, gameroom creation window
- streamline proxy to work with GTADS
- preferences for client
- Documentation

Things that won't make it into the release:

- Multiple admins
- GTA2 and Twisted Metal 2 game support
- 2+ player support in games
- SQL support
- Ping times and Localization
- Web Index of Servers being run

So, what you should expect when gtads comes out is support for GTA1 for 2 players on windows 2000 and windows XP. I haven't tested game support on a pre-2000 machine and for GTA1 it wouldn't work between win98 players and 2k users (random seed differences).

In the maintime i've been trying to find a way to grab the score/kills off the game via packets but I think that all the scoring is put determined on the client side and it does make sense. (Its more efficient for 2 players to know hitting a car is 10 pts rather than a player hitting a car and informing the other player its 10 points. Less chances for cheating too). I was hoping to try to grab an event such as each tallied kill or at the end game the scores would be matched and verified. Some more binary digging my turn up something. I want to create a stats system :-).

Optimizations, Windows 2000, and Gamelists

2006-03-08T12:45:00.000-05:00

Well as you may or may not know based on the end of the last post the optimization problem is solved. The CPU no longer impeads on the performance of the game play on either side and I was able to get a good game going with a friend of mine who lives 3000 miles away on the west coast (California) and you may be surprised as to what fixed it.
Anyway as of this post I also discovered that the windows 2000 machine I was using to test gameplay crashes independent of the proxy. Each time a game tries to initialize it kills its process. I'm not sure as to what is causing it but I know now that there isn't anything intentionally crashing it from the proxy. I do need someone with windows 2000 and GTA1 to help me test the game out though. I only know of 2 places where it works and all machines have been windows XP. If any ambitious soul out there wants to test it on their own and report results that is just as fine. I wanted to test 2 conditions (XP to 2000) and (2000 to 2000). I am planning to release the whole integrated product on the 15th (A week from now) and determining what works and doesn't will keep the windows 2000 people included. If not then the first release will just have to be Windows XP supported until a second release (These first few releases will be public betas and will have updates in very short increments).
I'm very anxious to see how this would run GTA2 and Twisted Metal over the proxy. So far I haven't bothered adjusting the proxy for those 2 games, which use the same ports but behave slightly differently. Twisted Metal seems to port its ports a little more randomly and I know from the tournament (on hold at the moment) that there were many problems with people connecting to each other with ports forwarded. Sounds like a good challenge to take up.
As it is right now the proxy can only support 2 players. I honestly don't know what the network play looks like with 2+ players. I've never packet sniffed a bigger game. I'm hoping that it's a Burden of Host mode (all players send to the host and recieve from the host) because that would be the easiest model to work with but it may turn out to be drastically different. I do plan to add in 2+ players into the game which will keep everyone interested in playing but that will be at a later time.
On a final note I am glad to see the interest in the people who plan to host their own GTADS server. I hope that each respective network does well from having GTADS apart of it. I also plan to host one up for the Fastping.net gaming network but the important thing is having a choice in hosting and going to different networks.

Proxy woes and the integration process and an icon

2006-03-07T12:39:00.000-05:00

Perhaps the joy of finally getting the proxy working made me so happy that I didn't see a small problem I am still having with setting up games between certain computers. So far I haven't had any luck with Windows XP to 2000 machines playing. I am not sure what is the X factor in this (DirectX versions? OS versions?) but I do plan to find out. On one windows 2000 machine it gets up to the point where the hoster sets the game in motion and the windows 2000 machine never connects and closes out (The game may change the UDP port). On another older windows 2000 machine it won't see the game at all so all this will need to be fixed if I am to get different people with different operating systems to play GTA. I don't think i'll be supporting windows 98 though. I don't have that OS on any computer to test with and I think this represents a minority of users. If anyone would like to help get support on windows 98 for gameplay you can add in to the code.

Besides these incompatibilities that will need to be fixed other things that are going on are:

- Optimization:
For the udp traffic that goes to and from the proxy the latency is not that bad, almost as good as an actual peer to peer, however, the proxy runs at 100% CPU slowing down the game. Fixing and optimizing some of the methods after receiving the data is the best bet.
- Integration:
I want to have all the Gameroom stuff ready for when the gameplay works, to just plug it in and release. Right now the client has a gameroom list that is currently being coded in the server and the client.
- Functionality:
As I said in the previous post, the proxy right now works as a developers device, it's not really friendly to a normal user to use and game, getting that more usable will make the game process seamless.

WANTED: An icon for the GTADS client, if you have an idea you want to send to me I will consider it. Any icon or future graphics in the app will retain the creator's full copyright.

Send your Icon to Steven dot Day at gmail dot com

Update as of 11:58 PM 3/7/2006

Fixed the GTA latency problem. GTA now runs at an excellent speed with a player across the country (From Ny to La) at 93ms ping.

GTA Proxy is COMPLETE!!!

2006-03-05T20:28:00.000-05:00

Yes, after 2 solid weeks of trial and error, ethereal logs, and damning DirectPlay, the GTADS proxy is finished. Testing it on my Lan it is able to proxy a game between 2 players. The speed over the lan is a little slower than a normal GTA1 game. For the first release of GTADS I may just release support for GTA1 with 2 player support and work on adding more users, more games, and optimizing the connections. Keep in mind that the latency will never be BETTER than normal GTA because of the extra steps through the java based proxy. For this coming week I will be focusing on adding proxy integration to the GTADS client, optimizing the game connection, and making sure everything else is ready for release. If you are interested in trying out the proxy, I warn you that it isn't very user friendly and is functional for programmer testing, nevertheless if you are still curious in using it, you can email me on instructions for playing with it and/or how to compile it from the CVS source.
Since the Proxy forwards directplay ports, it won't be very hard to incorporate GTA2, and other assorted games to the mix.

Proxy Progress Pics

2006-03-03T13:07:00.000-05:00

Well with trying to create a proxy for GTA1 (and in effect all directplay games) its been one hurdle after another to overcome. Well our next hurdle is the actual game play. If you look at these pics you will see that we have actually gotten players in the host's gameroom:

The Host finds the joining user.

From the user's perspective, the player joined and found a game.

For some reason GTA is crashing when the host decides to go ahead with the game. This should be fixed soon just like all other pervious problems.

Pictures will speak for this post

2006-02-24T16:59:00.000-05:00

Proxy on Client Machine (My Media PC)

Proxy on Host machine receiving the OK packet.

Client machine loading GTA Multiplayer

Entering in the loopback address

Our game session gets looked up

From these pictures you can see that there has been nice progress coming along with GTADS. There have been a lot of obstacles to overcome to get it going correctly, especially with Java (Lack of native IPX support so there was no option to proxy protocols, it was all straight TCP/IP). What's left to be done is the UDP game play and we should be good to go.

For anyone who is interested in how this is done within the code, i'll give you a quick overview. the proxy is loaded up with the parameter of being a host or client. If you decide to be a host and start the proxy the proxy will externally sit on port 8000 waiting for a proxy connection to it and get a "REQUEST OK!". You would then open up your game set up a normal TCP Host (I don't know why but this doesn't work if you host the game first, it must use a port thats not 2300). A virtualPlayer will be created on your computer representing the remote player. Traffic meant for the directplaysvr.exe will be sent over the proxy with the tag (DXPLAY or DXPLAYTCP, udp and tcp respectfully). TCP and UDP game traffic will be sent over the proxy tagged as VHOSTTCP and VHOSTUDP respectfully.

As the connecting client proxy, an IP address of the host will need to be entered in the textbox. Clicking start will send an acknowledgement to the host proxy to trigger it to be ready. A virtual host will be loaded on the computer representing the remote game hoster. The player would now load up their game and choose to join a TCP/IP game. The ip address to enter in would be localhost or 127.0.0.1 to play against the host. The remote game will load up for the player to choose. So far there is where I am at.

A release around the corner, I promise

2006-02-22T12:19:00.000-05:00

Its been a lengthy 8-9 months in getting GTADS out the door and I know a lot of people have been waiting. I don't blame you! This project originally started as an idea to just get friends of mine to play GTA without the problem of multiple ports and to have a match managing to make things more interesting. Now it is developing into a great thing, something to be shared by the community as a whole. I think one of the best things about GTADS will be the ability to run your own server for your own gaming network or for your LAN and while it hasn't been the fastest of development processes, its been a one man development show. By the end of this week or two (Depending on my schedule) we should have the first GTADS proxied game between two people going. The server and client jar betas have been released for your interest of new features or just to log on to contact me.

The Proxy, Dashboard, and Server oriented advertising

2006-02-16T14:12:00.000-05:00

It's been a little while but over the course of the last week or so I have gotten to work on getting everything working for GTADS. The proxy's code is complete but a lot of debugging of Theoretical code is happening to get the game to read on both sides. In preparation for the proxy though I have started writing some gameroom oriented code that will keep users up to date on how many users and games are on the server. I dubbed it the GTADS dashboard and it may find many other uses namely my plan in the future of it.
Now i'm not a big fan of in application advertisement but I realize the costs associated with hosting a server, they can pile up. What I think would be the best way to deal with this is not me putting advertising in all the clients like some sort of shareware but rather let it be server controlled. This means if you connect to someone's GTADS network and they have an advertising enabled server you will see advertisements. This shouldn't be intrusive in the least bit, since it is a chat and game type of application. However, if you go to a server without advertising you wouldn't see anything on your own client. I think this is being fair to all those who would potentially run a GTADS server to either make a few bucks back from hosting or make it a place to post announcements from affiliates etc. Now of course there is nothing stopping anyone from killing the advertising off their client since it is open sourced but I don't think that would be fair to your usage of someone else's bandwidth.

2v2 Team Twisted Metal 2 Tournament

2006-01-31T14:28:00.000-05:00

A couple of people from Fastping.net and I are hosting a small 2 on 2 team tournament in Twisted Metal 2 for fun. We haven't decided exactly when the matches will begin, possibly next week, but teams will be selected at random as well as the match ups. I will be updating this site and putting up a tournament informational site on it. If you are interested in join you can either email me, or leave me an IM for sday on the GTADS server. Don't worry if you do not have the game, just let me know if you want to participate.

Want to play GTA1 and Twisted Metal?

2006-01-31T00:53:00.000-05:00

Until the proxy is done and you'll see why it is taking a while to get it done and done correctly, I just want to write this little tidbit of information on how to get GTA1 and Twisted Metal 2 working between friends if you want to have a small game going. This really goes for all DirectPlay games which has the same method of handshaking and communication.

This only applies to you if you're behind a NATing firewall or router or have a software firewall installed.

- Port 47624 TCP/UDP: This is the port for the DirectPlay server. Clients connecting to a host use this connection to validate that the game is infact hosting on the host machine.
- Port 2300 TCP/UDP: The game seems to use the TCP in its initial rollup to starting a gaming connection. The UDP is most likely used for sending packets during game play.
- Port 2350 TCP/UDP: Similar to above but UDP is most likely used to recieve packets during game play.

On your router, whether you are a client or a host. You will need to open these three ports open (remember TCP and UDP protocols) and route them in to you machine.

GTA1, if you are not close by (usually in the same country helps ping), will probably be extremely laggy. Playing with more than 1 other player will most likely cuase this unless you and the other players have extremely good pings. Bandwidth isn't as big an issue as latency is as GTA1's netcode is not that good. The game waits for everyone's frame to be synced up before allowing another move it seems.

Twisted Metal 2 seems to work pretty well for pings up to 100ms. Better netcode, using approximation and coordinate correction make game play very smooth.

Note: For those of you who use GTAMP, this can probably apply to you guys too even though Sektor has some stuff up for you guys to read about anyway.

Until the proxy is done, this will help you guys. You can use GTADS to meet other players and set up a game until I have everything neatly in place. So, Happy Gaming. (Now you see why I want to get GTADS up and running, multiple ports are a pain in the ass)

Mac Screenshots

2006-01-29T12:57:00.000-05:00

Thanks to my friend Frank who had access to a Mac machine I was able to get a few mac osx screenshots of the GTADS client. The IM screen looks like it needs a little bit of tweaking on the mac version while everything else looks pretty good:

GTADS itself hasn't had much development lately partly because of the network problems but with the gaming piece really left to do, I will be able to focus primarily on that and get GTADS's initial release going. If you haven't already done so, please feel free to vote on the web poll on the side on which game you'd like to see working on GTADS.

Connection coming back, slowly but surely

2006-01-27T11:53:00.000-05:00

After about 2 1/2 days of down time on my connection the ISP situation seems to be coming to an end. There will probably still be areas of downtime until Saturday. I want to thank Matt Salacain, fellow GTADS project group member with hosting the server for the time being.

For the time being, it's been pretty difficult to make updates and do any sort of meaningful development while my access to the CVS server's been down as well but i'd say that many of the main features I wanted into both the client and server are pretty much what you are going to see in the official release. Tailoring the proxy to we I want has been a more difficult and slow task, but expect to see something functional within the next week. There is a lot of steps in just creating one virtual player and virtual client on each respective player's side and GTA's handshake mechanism really doesn't help the process. I honestly hope that other games out there do not use their cumbersome and overly complicated method of communication for multiplayer gaming but then again how many of us really look under the hood when firing up a game.

On another note, it has been about 8 months since GTADS was first initiated as a project on sourceforge and the real development started. I have to say that GTADS has come a long way since then and I have gone from having relatively no traffic on this site to having visitors from all over the world take a gander at where this project is at. I only hope that those same people will be able to enjoy playing their favorite multiplayer game when GTADS takes off.

Outages this week

2006-01-24T22:52:00.000-05:00

Unfortunately due to ISP problems, I had mentioned for the last few weeks, the mean GTADS beta server will be down for this week. I will try to get the server hosted on another network for the time being but until the internet connection is restored on my connection the Beta server as well as most development. I will most an update if a secondary server becomes available.

UPDATE: Temporary Beta server now at 64.121.64.210
Accounts will need to be created again.

More Server administration

2006-01-20T17:31:00.000-05:00

Getting all the items done for the good release requires that most things if not everything is practical to use. I had mentioned earlier that I would not do much of anything else in regards to the chatclient/server but it has become impossible not to. If anyone wants to have a good experience in using GTADS to play their favorite game it should run well both on the client and server side. I have been working, in my spare time, on getting chat server adminstration to a point where server administrators need not worry about abuses from the asshole user. Everyone who has ever run anything, from a website to an irc server knows what the asshole user is. This is a certain breed of user that goes out of their way to not only attempt to make life unpleasant for server administrators but fellow client users as well. So in the initial official (non-test) version of the server and client I am trying to patch up those loose ends and make everything as solid as possible. I could have probably released GTADS 2 months ago but it would have looked crudy and neglected. I will be adding a few things on the server side to give administrators more control of their server as I focus more and more on the gaming side of things. I think having a good gaming network requires having a sturdy chat network infrastructure to use.

For any of you who are eager to use GTADS to play your favorite games, here are the following games that are planned for the first official release:

GTA1
GTA2
Twisted Metal 2

Stay tuned for more updates to come and feel free to test the server and client on your favorite OS. I still need screenshots! :-)

Chatbot and Multiple chatrooms

2006-01-18T00:35:00.000-05:00

I wrote a little perl script that acts as a simple chatbot on the GTADS servers. Right now it is mostly for experiementing with features such as entering multiple chatrooms and responding to user data but I hope it will be used as a tool accompanying chatroom rule enforcement. Multiple chatroom support has finally been implemented serverside and will be implemented on the client side later on.

You can use a few commands for the chatbot to get news headlines.

!cnn - makes the chatbot display the latest CNN headlines
!gamenews - makes the chatbot display the latest gamespot.com news

Easy account sign up

2006-01-12T18:33:00.000-05:00

This has just been implemented as of 20 seconds ago. GTADS is now able to take new accounts from the client rather than using the website. Large portions of it are still untested but you can try it out. I have posted the new Server and Client on the page now if you want to try it. This will make account creation MUCH easier for anyone looking to create their own servers. There is an option to disable this in the gtadsconfig file if you do not want to use this feature. The code will be looked over and matured later on this week.

Storage move for Beta jars and new Javadoc

2006-01-11T13:24:00.000-05:00

I decided with the sporadic outages plaguing my connection, that i'll just move the GTADS server and client over to my sourceforge webspace. The downloads should be much faster and more reliable. You may not be able to connect to the beta server if it is out and you will be able to tell through the beta server status monitor on the page. The old links won't be removed but, the the links on the page will just be relocated.

Also, for those of you interested in taking a peek at the project under the hood without having to mess with any dev tools, I created a javadoc that can be the ideal tool for anyone interested in helping me out with development. The javadoc can be accessed at http://gtads.sourceforge.net/javadoc. Enjoy!

Screenshots request

2006-01-10T00:52:00.000-05:00

This is a request for anyone who has been following GTADS and trying out either the server or the client. Even though this project is coded in Java, it isn't the end all of portability, I would like to get some screenshots of people using GTADS. It can be from any operating system that you run but I would especially like to see some screen shots of GTADS running from a Mac machine or a Linux OS. It would also be interesting to get some feedback and console screen shots of the server being deployed on various platforms also. If you would like send me an email with the file attached and i'll post a lot of them on my next few screenshots posts as well as on the sourceforge screenshots page. Feedback would also interest me in who is using and playing around with GTADS, what features are liked, disliked, or should be added. So guys, fire up those screenshots.

GTADS Feature Update:

Maximum users enforced
GSIPS yes/no option
Account Refresh Cache yes/no option
Friends List yes/no option
SuperUser account implemented (Admin=...)

GSIPS implemented

2006-01-09T02:04:00.000-05:00

I am happy to announce that if you look on the lower part of your screen you will see something along the lines of:

server name=GTADS Beta Server
server port=7000
users connected=5
max clients=30
active chatrooms=2

The new GSIPS (GTADS System Information Protocol Server) has been implemented into the GTADS server. Right now it is rather crude and will be updated but the general idea is that a client, preferrably a script, connects to the port, usually on port 8000, issues a query message and gets the requested information. Right now, you can obtain the server information by connecting to the beta server and putting "query server". The GTADS starts aren't very pretty but as the project rolls out to its first release things will be refined. As of the 1/7 release there is no 'off' switch for GSIPS in the config file but as it gets completed and fully integrated into the server there will be an option to deactive it, a spec for GSIPS, and a release of the perl script i'm running as a small example.

GTADS Beta Server binary

2006-01-05T21:55:00.000-05:00

I finally got a config file set up for the GTADS Server. You know what that means? Now I can release the GTADS server for anyone to try. Right now there is limited functionality on the config file but enough for anyone to run the server with their own set of account files and friendsList cached files.

Here is what gtadsconfig looks like right now:


; GTADS Stock Configuration File

[General]
; General Settings
; Administrative Account
; Note: Publish not implemented yet
ServerName=GTADS Beta Server
ServerPort=7000
Admin=admin
publish=no
publish Url=
publish url parameters=

[Message of the Day]
Motd=yes
Motd File=u:/MotdBetaServer.txt

[FriendsList]
FriendsList=yes
; Directory to store friendslists
Friends List Directory=u:/friendsLists

[Debug]
Console Output=yes
Status Report Interval=30
Debug Level=5
Log=no
Logfile=


[Users]
; Accounts File sets the location of the usernames and passwords
; Client Signup states whether or new accounts
; are created from the client or by other means
; Account refresh - Interval between refreshing the accounts into the
; server cache (in seconds. set to 0 for never
Accounts File=u:/accounts
Client Signup=no
Account refresh cache=30

[GSIP]
GSIP port=8000;

Things that must be edited are in bold.

If you plan to play around with the server, please read the attached ReadMe.txt file associated with it. It has some important imformation on how to run the server.

Chat List Window

2006-01-04T00:38:00.000-05:00

Short Update:
- Uptimes are implemented into the Client and Server. Uptimes for users as well as the server are displayed.
- Chatroom Listing Window is also implemented. Users are able to view all the created chatrooms in the server and join them on the list easily. Here is a preview window of Chatroom Listing from the client:

New Chat Facelift

2005-12-30T10:00:00.000-05:00

This is one aspect of the programming I have been putting off and putting off and the more I put it aside the more it bothered me. A nicely packed interface for the chat window was something I wanted to put in since the beginning but I had always told myself there was too many important things to do before I got to it. Last night I set a list of five things to do on the clientside and the second thing on the list was in fact fix the chat window.
Originally the chatwindow just served as something functional until I could either muster up the courage to get more in depth with GUI programming (which I should) or get someone else to do it for me. But, realizing I was on my own on the development, I decided to do the former. The new face of the chat window isn't anything spectacular but it is a tightly packed and for the most part clean interface. I published the changes into the beta client zip file as well as the applet for anyone who's interested.
Picture of New Chat Window:

On the server side, I am also launching a sub server primarily for information queries. Right now it will be primarily for server vitals, such as uptime, amount of users, amount of games progressing, contact information of the administrator, etc. This can be used in conjunction with a CGI script to display server vitals on a webpage. If any other use arises off this query sub server, it will be adaptable enough to expand.
Though its not clear from a client's perspective, system and user uptimes are now being recorded on the server. Users who are curious of user uptimes will be able to invoke the /uptime command on the next release of the client.

GTADS Web Applet

2005-12-29T11:04:00.000-05:00

A friend of mine has given me an idea about uses for GTADS while it is still in development mode. I thought about it and decided to do it. I am doing a little side project on getting the GTADS client on the web as an applet. This will let people use GTADS as a chatroom and will give people a little insight on how GTADS is without having to download the zip file. There will be limited functionality as web applets go as you will only be able to connect to the GTADS server on 66.65.97.42. A partially developed version is up right now but I am warning anyone who tries it that it is not complete and it may cause undesired effects to your web browser. I feel that will get more people interested in checking out GTADS without having to be bothered downloading and installing the zip. Check it out and remember to create an account.

Happy Holidays and Permanent Friends List

2005-12-25T20:00:00.000-05:00

Judge by the traffic I get for my site a good portion of the visitors to my site are from Europe and a few from the middle east. Even so, whether or not anyone visiting this site celebrates it, happy holidays and merry christmas. I have been preoccupied with family events and have made one addition to gtads. The friendsList are finally disk friendly, which means if and when the server gets taken down and brought back up, the friendslist won't disappear. The list is stored to file and is loaded up at the start up of the the server, when anyone modifies their list by either adding or deleting a user, the changes are also written to disk to reflect that change. Also be sure to visit my other project site on modding my gameboy, that will be another fun and interesting project to undertake. :-)

ChatServer Feature Freeze

2005-12-16T11:06:00.000-05:00

With the maturity of the chatserver over the past few months and most notibly with the implementation of the FriendsList, I think I want to leave things they way they are for a while featurewise and get some actual gameplay implemented. It has been a long time and I had been worrying about the gaming aspect while I was busy building everything else. I know for people who are interested in this project, no one wants yet another chat system but rather something more to offer. To eventually get to this point I will hold a feature freeze on the chatserver and get everything related to the proxy (which includes adding the GameRoom infrastructure, an exception to the feature freeze) to a point where 2 users can play each other in GTA1.
Development on the chat server and client will primarily be comprised of bug fixes and fixing broken code but the FriendsList is the last non-proxy related project to occur. On that note I am happy to share that there have been zero problems with the FriendsList in the midst of testing. I will keep you posted on my continual progress with the proxy.

A Special Announcement

2005-12-14T10:15:00.000-05:00

Based on the last set of people who came on to the beta server to express their opinions about the client without reading anything related to the on going development I just want to mention the following points.

GTADS is done on my spare time. It is a project I enjoy working on and I try to get as much done as possible giving my busy schedule. Things that aren't feature complete or lacking, but are not related to anything broken are welcomed as a feature wishlist but aren't going to happen overnight. GTADS is written under the BSD License and as such you are more than welcome to assist with the project or even take the whole source code and write your own implementation.

Please READ the readme, this website, and other notes on GTADS before asking unresearched questions. As I have said in may previous posts the actual gaming feature (the proxy more notibly) is not complete. It is not in the 12/11/2005 beta test of the client. This project comprises of three parts, the server, the client, and the proxy. Having the proxy without the chat server environment seems useless and against the purpose of this project so, yes, there is a chat server and client being developed and when everything is done and refined it can be pieced together and work seemlessly. When you download the beta client read the README file attached to the download and see what you are able to do, what you are testing for. The readers of this blog will be the first to know when the proxy and everything related to gaming is done.

I realize that GTADS's current state is not very useful to those who really want to play GTA1 or any other game online. But as my previous point stands I am only one person working on many things and it will get done when it gets done. I welcome any help that may come along in the form of ideas, testing, and java development but I won't respond to uninsightful comments as "it's jsut a chatroom...". Rolling out a shittily put together project with minimal funtion is not my goal.