Multi Theft Auto now opened for business
We have been preparing this announcement for some time - this will mark the end of our "Developer previews". We are working towards releasing the 1.0 version; this version is no longer a "preview" and will be a turning point for the release of Multi Theft Auto.
Why? Today we are marking a new milestone in the history of Multi Theft Auto. After over 11000 revisions since 2004, contributions by over 16 world-wide developers, 1554 files and well over 550.000 lines of mostly C/C++ code, we have made the decision to re-launch Multi Theft Auto as an open-source project.
Of course, the migration to open-source is more than just slamming your undocumented source code in a zip up for anyone that is interested. In the past weeks, we have spent significant time cleaning up our entire code repository, by adding proper documentation in files and tagging them with headers, cleaning up any obsolete or ugly code we came across, and backtracking the logs of all files to ensure that the proper credits to developers were noted inside each individual file.
By open sourcing our project, we are encouraging anyone who is willing to participate in this project, to participate. For that reason, we are not "just" offering our source code: we have also opened our bug tracker and will be offering public access to our nightly build system that will be compiling a build every day (and has been long used for testing purposes). This way, any developer will be able to run the latest revisions, file bugs or submit patches.
Some may be concerned with us seemingly throwing our code and all its secrets out on the streets. Remember that, as we have seen in the past, a proper and solid multiplayer modification needs a lot more than just memory addresses and offsets. We hope that developers will be attracted towards contributing to our project, which is fairly straightforward and has an already established user base, instead of starting from scratch.
As of today, our entire code repository will be available from Google Code, which will be hosting our project. If you are interested in participating in development, you may be familiar with the process with other open-source projects: any developer that thinks his or her modifications should be merged into our trunk can submit a patch containing their modifications to our bug tracker. Each patch will then be reviewed and hopefully merged by the development team.
We believe that access to our source code will not only encourage developers to contribute, but will also be important for educational reasons: our modification is built in a highly modularized class-based design similar to that of other somewhat bigger projects. Of course, it is far from perfect, but this leaves some good room for improvement.
By no means does the migration mean that development has stopped or that progress was halted: we've simply decided to try a new approach to replace the old development style. The community can now follow any progress that is made, and even see the changes for themselves. By open sourcing, we open up the possibility of allowing unlimited community contribution - through our bugtracker, the development wiki, the community center, and of course the code itself.
Bear in mind that this migration does not imply a new release. We will be restarting our versioning, meaning that the next first release will be 1.0. Our roadmap will be available shortly on our bug tracker, so everyone will be able to track our development towards 1.0 and future versions. Nightly developer builds are also available, but are not recommended for anything else but development usage, as they will contain bugs and are updated daily.
In order to access our development facilities, head over to our community page (you'll need an account). If you're interested in checking out the code repository, head over to our Google Code project page. We'll be working towards smoothening everything out the next few days.
You can comment on this news post through our forums.
-The MTA team.
(if you know a lot #c / c++ 
