Hello, its been a while since the last update. You may have seen some of the bug fixes (a big thank you to those who reported them) or some small tidbits about dp3 by reading the forums. You may have also seen some of the changes and additions if you have been reading the wiki. Below, you can see a summary of what has been worked on for Developer Preview 3:

Most notable new scripting functions:
- Ped support
- Customizable handling for vehicles
- DirectX drawing
- Clientside money handling
- More pickup functions
- shutdown() function to close down the server
- More xml stuff (xmlNodeGetSubNodes and xmlNodeGetParent)

Most notable improvements and/or bug fixes:
- Heavy emphasis on fixing and improving shooting synchronization issues, as they have been revealed as a major issue by user-created resources. This includes a major change in the streamer.
- Carjacking issues leading to desync problems mentioned above.
- Sliding bugs directly linked to shooting sync mentioned above and sliding bugs that only affected animations.
- No shooting with uzis while crouched is fixed
- Scripting improvements on certain functions (most notably rewritten camera functions).
- Fixing issues discovered in MTAs default resources while using them with certain settings or under certain conditions.
- Continued work on the map editor resource is being done by its QA team developers. They hope to have it done for DP3.

Note: A daily changelog of developer work should resurface sometime after the release of DP3. This is a small list of some of the most major bug fixes for DP3. There are many more unmentioned fixes. The changelog is temporarily gone due to equipment upgrades on the machine that was used by developers to log build changes and automatically update the changelog on this site.

In order to ensure that releases are stable with a large amount of players, MTA is considering changing the mass testing policy from semi-public testing to public testing, in order to achieve the largest player counts possible. The QA team would ensure that the build has no major issues and conduct a public test, perhaps weekly. This action would lead to much more mass testing and more confidence in stability. In effect, it would pave the way for quicker releases. Watch for more news on this, coming soon.

We are currently in the process of switching servers for our mtabeta.com community system. This will be causing some downtime for the entire system, but we expect this to be fixed later on today.

Update 5/2/2008

For all of our new users trying to install the Multi Theft Auto: San Andreas Developer Preview 2 release: the installer relies on the above system, which is currently not online. A result of this is that the installer will fail to provide you with a serial which is needed to launch the application.

We kindly ask you to hold on a little longer for our next Developer Preview 3 release (containing an updated and working installer) - or the launch of our mtabeta.com community system at our new hosting facility, whichever comes first.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

Update 8/2/2008

All issues regarding the mtabeta.com domain and it's hosting should be resolved now. The Developer Preview 2 release should be working fine again now.

On a sidenote, we are planning another server upgrade pretty soon which should be able to provide us with some faster services.

We have noticed some stability problems with the All-Seeing Eye master query servers, leading to issues with the in-game server browser for some Multi Theft Auto users.

We are currently in the process of developing our own server/master query protocol to replace the All-Seeing Eye protocol, in collaboration with another large query provider. Besides providing a faster and more stable server browser, we will be able to give you more in-game information about our servers as well.

Hopefully this feature will be in one of the upcoming developer previews.

In case your server browser does not work properly: we would like to redirect you to Game-monitor.com, an on-line server-browser that should contain all the Multi Theft Auto servers that are normally registered in the server browser.

We've been very pleased with the reaction to our first developer preview we released last week. We've had fun playing with some of the community and it's be great to see what people have got up to with our powerful scripting/mapping system!

We've spent the last week fixing issues that were in v1.0-dp1; some we knew about before we released and many were found by the community.

So, today we're releasing Developer Preview 2! As we said last week, we're focusing on fixing bugs, so all your new feature requests aren't in this release. That said, we've added a few new things to this release that you asked for - windowed mode for scripters being the most significant. We've also fixed about 17 bugs and made a few tweaks here and there and we've included some updated gamemodes and maps. A full changelog can be found on the download page. 

The same caveats apply to this release as before - it's a preview. We know there are bugs, we know things are incomplete, but hopefully these previews give you a clearer picture of how things are now and give us a valuable source of feedback. 

Please Note that if you're using v1.0-dp2, you can only play on v1.0-dp2 servers. We strongly recommend that all servers upgrade as this fixes some important servers issues (being able to ban players for example!)

If you have a problem, comment or just want a chat, contact us on IRC - #mta on irc.multitheftauto.com or our forums.

For people interested in scripting, mapping or helping with MTA generally, we've released a brand new WIKI with extensive documentation of our 800+ scripting functions. You can view it at http://development.mtasa.com. If you want scripting help, contact us on #mta.scripting on irc.multitheftauto.com.

Click here to visit our download page  

It's the moment you've been waiting for! It's the moment we've been waiting for!

We're happy to announce a preview release of MTA: SA Deathmatch as a good start to the new year. As a new years resolution, we've decided to try much more frequent releases. We've said this before, but we've finally got a solid base to work from and a we're in a good position where you - the community - can give us valuable input.

The key emphasis of this initial release is to get your help in making MTA the mod you want. We're not going to be taking feature requests - initially, but we're want you to help to find bugs, create game-modes, maps, resource web pages and anything else you want! We're going to remain focused on fixing bugs until we have a release that we're happy to call a final 1.0 release.

There are a few things you should be aware of before playing MTA.

• Game-modes are of varied quality - some are very good, some could do with some work. Feel free to contact the authors if you're interested in helping with them.
• There are some bugs still! Please report them on the forum.
• There are some crashes too, not many. What remains are generally specific to specific game-modes. We've played for 3+ hours in busy servers with no crashes, but your milage may vary!
• We have not included the editor in this release, a few issues appeared just before we were going to release. We'll release it as soon as we can.

If you have a problem, comment or just want a chat, contact us on IRC - #mta on irc.multitheftauto.com or our forums .

For people interested in scripting, mapping or helping with MTA generally, we've released a brand new WIKI with extensive documentation of our 800+ scripting functions. You can view it at http://development.mtasa.com . If you want scripting help, contact us on #mta.scripting on irc.multitheftauto.com .

We intend to release frequent updates, so watch this space! We can't wait to hear what you think!

Click here to visit our download page  

Happy new year!