And so another week comes to a close.  The driving force of the mod has been exceptional.  This has been reflected with changelogs, which are being filled at a decent pace every day.

First, I'll start off by being completely honest: shortly after last week's write up, we ran into somewhat of a crisis.  Suddenly, DM's stability went down the drain over the period of 24 hours.  Obviously, this led to huge worries all round.

It took around two days of hard work from the MTA team, and thorough testing from QA to get anywhere.  The issue was traced back to vehicles, and I can thankfully say that it was eliminated entirely.  On top of this, we've seen fixes in terms of vehicle sync, and general issues surrounding vehicles - including those to do with drivebys, explosions and potential crashes.

Once this issue was finally gone, everyone could start progressing again.  We've had fixes in model loading, plus tweaks in MTA's "Access Control List (ACL)".  The ACL controls all permissions of resources and players, ensuring security - you wouldn't want a small map trying to take control of admin, would you? 

There have also been various fixes in terms of scripting consistency, including event cancelling (which will be a lot more clearer come release), and event handlers (see scripting tutorials). 

On top of this, there have been numerous “on-connect” issues that have been patched up.  These generally are to do with loaded resources causing issues for players that join the server midway (if you’ve been watching changelogs, this issue has been referred to as “PE6”).

Lastly, we’ve seen a tweak in some already existing code.  Some of GTA’s internal stunt code was exported to script – with events onClientPlayerStuntStart and onClientPlayerStuntFinish, which are triggered when a player performs stunts such as a two wheel bonus, wheelie or a stoppie.  This should allow for flexibility, and it is up to gamemode writers to decide how they want to reward stunters. 

I can say it has been a very hectic week.  Despite this, enthusiasm has remained high and I expect this to continue.

Keep the comments coming, but we'd encourage you to avoid discussing MTA's merits compared to other mods - thanks. 

Until next week.