MTA team is developing MTA Orange. The relation between the two mods - IV:MP and MTA: Orange (currently the codename only) - will be something like the relation between SA-MP and MTA:SA. The only thing is that there's no war between the two, because there are few other half-discontinued projects for IV multiplayer out there since the CodeHook was released. What I mean is that for sure MTA team's creation will take longer, will have probably some R* headers and hence more functions and better synchronization and stability, just like MTA:SA to SA-MP.
IV:MP 0.1 Alpha has been around for a while though. Alpha 3 was scheduled to release yesterday (22nd May 2010), but I suppose the QA (quality assurance) team together with developers to make it a lot better. And there are some new functions as well. GTA IV has more to offer so I'd love to see hundreds of functions when it is close to completion.
AFAIK it is quite hard to synchronize everything in the project code, such as player or vehicle movement, and I suppose weapon handling is even harder, and animations is top of the line. That's due to the way everything has to be done, so the synchronization isn't perfect yet. I can't wait until 3rd alpha release so they perhaps have EFLC supported and 1.0.6.0 patch support as well.
ThePro said:
Remember, it was Leopard and Jenskta who got multiplayer mods to gta iv, never forget!
Leopard isn't much of a coder, Jenksta has been away for a long time but he is here now though, working hard on the project. Furthermore everyone with much knowledge of how to synchronize packets and create/deliver them can make a GTA IV multiplayer modification with code hooking. But it takes a lot of research and work.