ChrML

Sounds great... but don't ask the MTA team about this, ask a modder. Hardcoding a such thing into the core is just bad, especially when any modder can add this functionality using the upcomming codename Blue's add-on support.

An automated bus service sounds great, and with the new blue server's add-on functionality, it won't be too hard to make working. There might be a few problems I don't know if the blue API can handle though. What if someone tries to jack the bus? What about terrorism?

I'm a quite experienced C/C++ programmer. Anyway I can help with some development? Blue sounds very promising and I want do whatever I can to help it getting released soon.

When I read once again, I see that GTA is defintly not the best game for you, as the many ways (either overpowered or not) to kill is what makes GTA unique. These are games for you: http://www.counter-strike.net http://games.activision.com/games/wolfenstein (from second world war, good old fashioned shooting game) No cars and heli's in those games.

CS is Counter-Strike, a single/multi player game where you get real guns, with other words a good old fashioned MP game. If you think car kill and heli kill is stupid, then why do you play GTA online? There are endless of good games where you get guns, health, and body armor where no cars and heli's exist? Why don't u play those. They got better multiplayer support aswell. Without cars and choppers, GTA is just like any other MP shooting game, just a bit worse MP support. And btw, if there are 3 people against u, u can still look at the map, however, the cars and heli's got nothing to do with that. That's just bad teams.

Jesus man, if you wanna have a good old fassioned rummble, go and play Wolfenstein, or CS. This is GTA VC, here we kill in choppers, run over by car, shot eachother, dicing eachother up with chainsaw, and hopefully soon driveby too. And one more thing, you always see/hear the choppers REALLY WELL, if u can't think at two things at once, then go back to CS. People in chopper are well seen at map, cuz they move often fast/through buildings, and are about always arrow up. I always look at the map and screen at same time, and I'm ALWAYS aware of when a chopper comes, and where it is, and 95% of times how to dogde. It isn't exactly harder to get away from a chopper than from a guy standing next to you shooting you again and again with a shotgun/m60, so u never get chance to do something (that is unfair for sure). Dodging a chopper when the guy in the chopper really lags is much harder though, but that's about the same in all cases (always join a server which has a low ping to you). Sorry if I'm saying something said 100 times before, I haven't read all posts yet.

When someone jacks your car while your in it, you're mostly placed at the roof of it. which is OK. The problem however, is when someone jacks you in a chopper (easy enough, just sit in the chopper while it is on ground), cuz when you are placed on the roof .... splatt splatt ... Since vehicles are handled quite generally in the MTA core (I've heard), I think you should be placed about a meter away instead (watch out for through wall movements (hard, I know )), to avoid chopper jacking to become such critical for the victim . Or the easiest way will be to add exceptions for three vehicled (Maverick, Police Maverick, and Hunter), and not treat it as a general vehicle (this can be done for boats aswell, to partially solve that problem).

Omg, just enable Windows 2000 mode in XP, so you get the Win2k style on logon and shutdown, and the "Windows Security blabla's Computer" dialog when you press Ctrl+Alt+Del (which goes over everything), so you can press Task Manager (everything still minimized), and shut down GTA VC. Give google a search if you wonder how to enable it (it's a registry key).

Sorry for doublepost, but the UDP packages should have a number indication which number of packages it is, as UDP packages are not guaranteed to arrive in same order as sent (that's what causes players to jump back sometimes, and suddenly appear at a complete other place, and then come back to where he was). Then if the index number is lower than the last package arrived, it drops it (if not 0 to indicate that the counter restarts when reached a high value). However, you should send many counter reset packages to make sure it's received, so the receiver doesn't suddenly drop all packages due to that he missed the package telling counter reset.

Well, T1 is only about 1mbps, and I guess most people have that by today (atleast that's about the cheapest internet you can get here in Norway). It's true that TCP neccessarily isn't the best for this mod (players will hang back in time, until Windows reports that you are trying to send more than Windows can ship away (if non-blocking mode)). Atleast over LAN, TCP should definitly be used (as said, there should definitly be an own modus for LAN), cuz Windows does really handle TCP better over short pings (<1 ms ping). Btw, rockets from the Apache chopper doesn't look synced exactly (I shot a player 10 times with the rockets, but it never blew).

I'm a quite experienced internet/LAN programmer, and I know that multiplayer over UDP is not really a good idea always (atleast not LAN, as I believe many plays on). TCP is better as it's based on streams, and UDP are not guarantied to arrive (overflow is the most usual cause). What would be cool if there was a LAN mode, and an internet mode. Ofcourse peds and cars which are AI controlled is impossible (or atleast very hard) because normally the cars and peds are dynamically added at the end of the drawing distance, and the server can't controll the cars over the entire city, and transfer the position of each single on to all clients instantly). Btw, what's the problem with the boats (except wave sync)?