mabako network

…Can it? Below shows my opinion about the recent SA:MP happenings at 20th of April, 2008. As some things’ve changed, read below where it says update.

This is an interesting aspect which seems to have evolved of SA:MP now, or, to quote someone in particular not me, SA:MP goes weird - you can buy an official Server Rank.
Let’s have a look back at what happened.

In 2006, the SA:MP team released their multiplayer modification SA:MP 0.1 (and a month later, 0.1b) with an interesting feature called “Official Server list”. A couple of servers, chosen by the team, such as littlewhitey’s server, PartyServer, XII’s and Novocaine’s server were present at this time. The regular player count was pretty high, the servers might have lacked some decent admins actively watching for cheaters all the time.

The list of servers being official changed from time to time, at all giving an insight in a couple of modes which were played by more than 10 players at peak times (unless a lot of “Unnamed” or empty servers). In conclusion, I can say it was a bit balanced on what people wanted to play, and as a server has proven to handle lots of players with decent mode, they may have been added to the list - such as GamerX. LVP has been added because of Peter’s developer position, but nevermind, it is still a cool gamemode.

There hasn’t been much of a change until recently, almost the same servers, not much possibilities to get a new server there. SA:MP Team has decided to give the betatesters the right to decide over SA:MP’s new Official Servers, and there have been a couple of restrictions on it - Top 50 Game Rank on Game-Monitor.com, a dedicated admin team and not a lot of cheaters and hackers, at all.
A few servers made it into the official server list based on this new criteria, but it seems the effort was a waste, seriously.

As of yesterday, this has importantly changed. As you may have read on the forums, you can now buy official server rank, with a fairly high price of 40$ a month or 90$ for 3 months. Looking at the host comparison table I made up a while ago, found at sa-mp-hosts.com, it evidently shows you need to pay a lot more, especially with some servers with under 100 Players (being 20 € according to SA:MP Host’s current prices), it would sum up to something around 50 Euro for one month. Hardly cheap, in my opinion.

Speaking from my personal experience as of hosting some SA:MP servers, I would personally not buy a official server rank for my own (non-existant) server, I would rather buy another dedicated server and host some more servers on that, simply since it generates new money - whereas I am not sure an official server rank would get me a waste of new customers. Even if it would do, where shall I put them? On a non-existant server?

I’m not sure if it’s a step forward or not, some of the SA:MP team may support and like this new way for official server ranks, which surely donates towards their Servers, but I have to look on my own limited amount of money. Apart from getting special server builds, there’s nothing much interesting in the offer otherwise, and even this is not worth paying 40$, 30€ or such a month.

However, as I am hosting SA:MP servers, I have some kind of duty to offer them official server rank, we will see how much interest this idea will gain, especially regarding this price.

We’ll see what happens…

Update a week later, 27th of april.
At the time written, above was valid, but I’ve taken my time to get this post published to look at it after some days. Seems to be a good point proven for now.

Later that day (20th of april), SA:MP’s services have appearantly been DDoS’ed, which led Kye to the decision to close the official forums and the official master server list.

In result of that, we’ve started to - yet again - use Popz and Wacko’s fallback-forum in case anything like this would happen again. And here it is: forum.sa-mp.co.uk.

Now this is interesting: At the 25th, Kye decided to make a smaller version of the forums available, basically just for providing support for SA:MP and his new - whatever it may be - Grand Larcency… And no, a sub-forum exists but no information has been provided, at all. Gangs sections and screenshots/videos as well as server advertisement have been cut out, yet you can find them at our new unofficial forums at forum.sa-mp.co.uk.

On a side note, you may use my provided sa-mp loader to enable browsing official list too. You may obtain it from here.

Put it in your GTA folder (where samp.exe is), then you can either launch it before SA:MP and it will start automatically, or you can use it after you’ve started the browser and it’ll just put another address in.

cheers
mabako

As some of you’ve already played, you might remember the starting screen with Tommy, Claude and CJ sitting in front of their PCs? I just found a really nice detail on the texture I wouldn’t dare to keep secret.

Let’s zoom it a bit

I’d say it clearly expresses “Kyeman is a dumbfuck!”, don’t you think?

Besides that, I’ve been working on the samp-host.net-Homepage for some days and - compared to the old one - really improved it.

cheers
mabako

“Long time no see”… Hi!

As some people on the forum have asked for my scripts I once put online at mabako.net/samp/, I feel like pointing this out: I have no intention of re-opening the download to a wide public, so please, for god’s sake, stop pm’ing me about something which I wouldn’t change. I would be lying if I’d say these files aren’t downloadable anymore, just I’m not hosting them at the location they were for long time.

As important as this fact, I would reasonably appreciate if people would not ask me for support with their SA:MP scripts. I’m pretty much done with SA:MP, they’ve moved to some weird other IRC network and I doubt I helped people out there even once - or even if I did - compared to GTANet a really small amount. I am still staying with GTANet, no reason for me to actually change to gamesurge.

And since Kye decided there should be some changes happening, look what we got - a reduced amount of developers, as Peter, Y_Less, aru left the dev-team, no SA:MP-Anticheat (more commonly known as SAC) - horray for all cheaters. I would not think they could be more happy now, a free unban for every SAC-caught cheater (except some that have, unfortunally, been unbanned even earlier). It’d be too ironic to say “Good Choice, Sir. Good Choice.” as the Ammunation-Guy always does, but it really fits here.

So in conclusion up to now, I’m mainly done with SA:MP.

Now to something different…
Some of you might remember the good ol’ Public Enemy No.1 for SA:MP, Denver/Astro’s release of PEN1 and all the new servers that might’ve come accross you - however, I couldn’t be more glad to introduce a completely new gamemode to you, on an almost new Game - Multi Theft Auto.
Featuring a lot of stuff from the original PEN1, there’s still some major changes - as it has all been coded by myself and ported to LUA. So right now, there might be some major features missing - there’s mainly CashBox&HotWire to do - but I’m still working on it. There’s also a lot of cool extensions to MTA’s regulary gameplay, such as jetpacks, ammu-nations, fast-food shops and Pay’N’Sprays (to get rid of your wanted level) - yet planned are vending machines (if I’d just find all the locations), tuning shops in general, and especially for PEN1: Legends, DM-Arenas with objects, new Houses and Businesses, probably some nice and cool locations such as the Malibu-Club known from Vice City, same as the Bank you had to rob in the last of Malibu’s missions - however it was called. Especially the Malibu has been something I have been missing in VCS, I still can’t believe they were lacking such a great place…

However, when looking at mtasa.org - you’ll notice some processes happening, which stuff is added and how well the development goes. The Server - mtasa.org:22004 - is open most time of the day, there might happen some crashes - but should not happen too often. In any case, it’s auto-restarting, so unless I want it to be taken down, it’s up.

I may also point out at the IRC-Channel, irc.gtanet.com #pen1-legends just as a place for discussions and ingame-echo.

cheers
mabako

Hi,

I’ve written an admin script, and there’s a couple of features you might be interested in:

Link to SA:MP Forum Topic
Link to Download

Cheers
mabako

Oh well, has been short time of waiting for 0.2.2 now, right? Sure, not as long as we’re waited for 0.2 at all, but I guess 0.2.2 isn’t really what I expected.

To summarize it to a point from my own experiences/thoughts:

• Server crashes more often for no appearant reason, using code that worked fine in 0.2.1.
• Game crashes more often - 0.2.2 game crashes are the only ones that’ve happened to me for a long time, I’ve played (almost) crash-free before.
• Game lags a lot - again, was fine with 0.2.1
• synched Head Movements… I don’t see the point of that, that’s a simple feature that does like nothing to the Gameplay, it’s just others see were you look - I called SA:MP fine without that also.
• Wrapped SendClientMessages are not needed, the authors of a game mode or filterscript might’ve taken into consideration to write long lines with just more info
• I really don’t care if name tags can or can not be seen through walls
• SQLite has no reason to be built in in the server, a plugin for that would be my choice. And I’ve no SQLite server yet, why should I? The MySQL plugin works fine.
• Name Tag draw distance can be set by the server? Why would you want to change that, nametags are fine as they were with 0.2.1, at least I wouldn’t see why you’ve need to change that.
• From what I’ve read from other server_logs, SAC, SA:MP’s Anti-Cheat, is still depending on the master server way too much. I don’t know if in between there’s a way to save the anticheat-file locally, if not this is a great missed feature I would’ve a lot rather welcome than synched Head Movement

The other stuff, for example netcode fixes, consuming less bandwith etc. - basically the, for me, useful things are of course great, but there’s some shadow of crashes about it. If the first 3 things wouldn’t be, I’ve lot less to complain, they’re rather making the big deal.

I’ve had some recent discussions about this with various people, let’s share some of the opinions I got…

#sa-mp.scripting, started at Aug 29 23:06:32

«mabako» bad sa:mp coders, you forgot to put in the back number plate *rolls off*
«Alex» and mabako: I’m very sorry we missed that highly minor feature barely anyone notices, if you think you can do a better job go for it
«mabako» was just looking at that post in the forums
«mabako» imo 0.2.2 comes with heck of not needed stuff… especially text wrapping to new lines isn’t neccessary, and the kill icons not having a black background box
«breadfish» i agree
«Alex» mabako as I said before when you write a better one you can complain
«krisk» Allways look at the bright side, for a couple of hours ago we where moaning about when 0.2.2 is out, and now you actually moan about what’s in it..
«Alex» some people are already on about 0.3, you’re all ungrateful and stuck up!
«mabako» sure Sir, let’s wait for 0.3, I’m not expecting that release to happen before october 2008.
«Alex» you can’t shut up for one minute and realise that this is free
«krisk» mabako - For your info, the dev team have worked their ass of to make this release to get rid of the crash programs and hackers etc. and now you’re just disrespectful and moaning about the release they’ve just made, seriously thing about it.
«breadfish» …

Oh well, first line is signed with some irony at the end, highly unnoticeable.

I always knew I can be “all ungrateful and stuck up!” - well, I wasn’t after 0.1, 0.2, 0.2.0 and 0.2.1(r2), this could’ve had a reason. And to add, I never said I’ve never said I’m disrespectful about fix to those crashing programs, neither can I read from the above quote I was moaning about that - I was rather on about the stuff that has been implented now, because I can’t believe that I waited that long for those features which are, again, in my opinion, unneeded, I would be completely happy if all 0.2.1 r2 bugs would’ve just been fixed and it’d be sold as 0.2.1 r3. But this isn’t the case, the SA:MP team added features that’re not needed, and this is, like you can see from the other quotes, not only MY personal opinion.

And well, sure it’s free, financed by all that advertising on the forum which I’ve NEVER clicked since it’s in the first post, in the last post and above the thread view, it’s in my opinion just too annoying - and the increasing amount of ads shows to me, there IS some money earned with it, so why shouldn’t they try to get more… To be honest, I would rather spend, not 50€, but 10 to 20€ to get the forums ad-free for me. The team won’t earn now anything from me anyway, it’s just me getting annoyed.

Jolteon, Aug 29 too.

#mn, started at Aug 30 01:03:37

«mabako» damospiderman » http://paste.mabako.net/11
«damospiderman» oh i’m here
«damospiderman» I think sa-mp 0.2.2 looks and feels too cheap now
«damospiderman» with all the chat window crap
«damospiderman» looks like i just installed a clean install of windows or something
«damospiderman» with all the bubbly crap
«damospiderman» ahh i just read the paste bin

hiker, started at Aug 30 18:54:34 2007

«hiker» is your server crashy now?
«mabako» no
«mabako» I’ve just removed it
«hiker» ok… I just saw Mount’s comment and let you know that my server was crashy cuz of the time-change function
«hiker» I needed to remove it now working on a usable one…
«mabako» pfff… there’s much that could crash
«mabako» I managed to crash my local server + client with a nearly empty script :<
«hiker» ://
«mabako» that’s why i probably won’t do any public script for 0.2.2
«mabako» too crashy, too much not needed functions (scrolling chatbox, head movements)
«hiker» well, I’m getting disapointed of all of it now
«hiker» yea…
«mabako» ive talked with some other guys, couldnt find one who is really happy with 0.2.2
«hiker» I really believe that, but meh… change needed (?) well I didn’t feel this by CS, it’s been on for years and still alive
«hiker» but anyway, at least I got to know some excellent ppl like you and some others…

Reading this forum topic kind of underlines what I’m saying, especially related crashes.

So right, you could’ve seen what I wanted to tell you, if you’d read carefully. Just to quote myself, in my opinion, 0.2.2 is a step backwards from the nice, more stable, crash-free 0.2.1 (click). SA:MP Host will continue hosting servers, of course it’s your choice to keep 0.2.1 or go with 0.2.2. I’ve anyway just closed my server, since a lot of people decide the way newer is better - it had like nearly no players before, and it won’t have any now.

Oh, it seems I need to fully agree with this statement…

The way the team treats its players is awful; players that have stuck by the SA-MP Community for long periods are still treated like crap.

From what I can tell based on my own point of view, this seems to be fully true, I wouldn’t agree with this quote after 0.2.1, but well, seems some things changed a bit.

Update Aug 31, 01:25 somewhen: Seems R2 CLIENT has been release, let’s see what changes.

cheers
mabako