Funny Occurance

[Gtatari]

I was playing MTA with a friend, and we were playing, but his gta3 crashed and mine did not. the MTA was still connected. he then got on AIM and we talked about it, but my GTA3 sill running. i alt-tabbed back into GTA3 and all the msgs he was sending over AIM, were comming through and appearing in game. it was kewl. if anyone here knows how to demask keys in vb, i could write a better alternative to the current chat. until .03 comes out

[Flamin-h]

Thats pritty freeky, but kewl at the same time.

Too bad you were the only person playing. Ohhhh were you meaning that if you were playing and somone talks to you on AIM/MSN it comes uo in game? If so that would be pritty good, even better if you could reply back to them in-game.

[HorIzoN]

WEIRD thing is I was playing MTA the other night and I had some Explorer windows open in the background and some text from a website appeared in game in the message window. I dont know why it carried that over. and another time I had a readme file open in Notepad and it carried some text from that into the in-game chat... weird..

[TheBigJ]

i wish i new vb so i could look throught the code and see what was happening...i mean this is a break through in technology. Think about it. Instead of a pop-up from aim minimizing your game, it just appeared as in game text. That would be soo tight

[Gtatari]

well the thing is, is MTA uses winsoc. which sends a variable type called a string. if you are familiar with algebra, you'll know that a variable is a letter or word (such as x ) that represents a number. a sting is a variable or word that represents text. its called a string because:

h-e-l-l-o is a string of letters. put together they make hello. in C, there is no such things as strings (in C++ there are CStrings and such) so originally Strings of letters were created, wich infact is just a grouping of letters.

ok the reason i explained all that is becuase:

-MTA sends strings to each other (your chat)

-Obviously AIM, and IE send strings of DATA. if you've ever looked at the HTML of a webpage.. its just coding that displayes the site. so if you have MTA running and string data comes thro your connection at the same time, MTA thinks its chat, and thus displays it in-game

i know VB, so i could easily write a program that does this:

-You hold down alt and type. when you release alt, it sends your message.

-the benefit of this, is you would not have the laggy typing MTA comes with

you just run my prog in the background while running mta. the only thing is:

-i dont know how to unmask keys in VB. this means, disable all the ingame keys such as exit car, or change camera. so its still hard to type.\

On some other notes:

-yes, if you go on aim, and you friend that your playing has aim open, he would see all your messages, if you alt tab out and type to him

-its best to close all internet related programs while running mta, to remain stability.

[Wezz6400]

Personally I would not like that, I think it's annoying that when you want to type you must hold alt. Just advice people to close all other programs, or try to make mta send a little code just before the chat and let it only display the strings coming in starting with that little code (just a idea). Example: mta1 sends this to mta2: $%&I am winning loser! mta2 sees the $%& so it displays the text I am winning loser! as ingame chat. Maybe it can be solved in another way, I don't know vb. It's just a simple idea, I even don't know if it's possible.