Vice City Online - Public Beta Test

[trev]

I was a bit disappointed with the beta...but I am hopeful that they'll keep their word. From what's been said in that post, they said that it won't be released on the 10th.

[ferrari32]

I was a bit disappointed with the beta...but I am hopeful that they'll keep their word. From what's been said in that post, they said that it won't be released on the 10th.

[venkat]

Damn!!! After all these years ...

[DECEiFER]

Hi folks,

Just so you know, ReGeX and I have been keeping tabs of this thread from day one and we are appreciated of your comments, good or bad. Those of you who have posted negative comments, we fully understand why. If I was in your shoes I'd be thinking the same.

There was one post that got my attention:

Let's say no one from the public wants them to finish this. Will they abandon this a.k.a run away as if it never happened?

If literally nobody wanted it, then it would be a waste of time. However, that's not going to happen, as it seems people still do want it, so it's a non-issue.

We have future plans and VC-O isn't the only project we will ever work on, but for now, it is getting 100% of our attention. Hold tight, we're not going anywhere.


Thank you all for your posts.

[GRAND]

Good! Keep working guys, I hope VCO will be fixed soon, good luck!

[Charley]

Good to know you're gonna stick at it, I wanna try that mythical weapon sync that Knucis has been banging on about for the last however many years.

[kyber7]

Alright, don't disappoint us again and good luck 

[XGamer]

I'm sure that Knucis is jumping because he saw Deceifer in VU forums....hhhhh

[DECEiFER]

Despite the instability of the public beta, the VC-O weapon sync is still second-to-none, including to MTASA. We have a lot of respect for the great work the MTA team does and it is by far the best SA multi-player client, even though SA:MP is still sadly more popular (it doesn't deserve to be). So when we say that our weapon sync is way more precise, we don't say it lightly. We tested it and came to the conclusions ourselves, and you guys will be able to do the same, by comparing the two, hopefully very soon. Unless VC:MP 0.4 can better MTASA's weapon sync, we're going to have the best VC multi-player weapon sync there is.

Keep an eye on our website / forum / blog in the coming days to a week for an announcement of team administrative changes that we're in the middle of discussing.

[kyber7]

Real way to prove that the weapon sync is OK - throw some hardcore pros in your servers, let them fight, ... , profit

[DECEiFER]

Ah that's true. But we went about it the snory boring way, using science as our guide. It's one of the least enjoyable aspects of testing but it has to be done. It was tested on several local servers over a period of a few weeks, so we mixed it up a bit to make sure the results weren't false positives, or vice versa.

The real benefit for VC-O is ReGeX. He's a man with an in-depth understanding of the Vice City and San Andreas engines, and with many years of professional experience with reverse engineering BIOS' and God only knows what else in the past, he also has an in-depth understanding of what makes up a great sync system. He's one of the only true professionals modding for GTA out there. Once the stability issues are kicked, you'll see what I'm talking about.

The downside of having ReGeX is that we only have ReGeX. Even Superman can't be in two places at once. That simply means that without adequate testing, it was inevitable that the public beta would be a disaster. He also took on too much at one time and things were bound to be sloppy because of that. If it takes more time now to get it right, then so be it. But as the saying goes, hindsight has 20/20 vision. We all learn from our mistakes.

[Charley]

Real way to prove that the weapon sync is OK - throw some hardcore pros in your servers, let them fight, ... , profit

Exactly this. The player base you're looking to draw in would be from VC:MP, Deceifer. There are relatively few people out there who search for an online multiplayer mod for Vice City on a day to day basis, so drumming up public support for a relatively unpopulated project is hard. Instead of just looking to the wider public, I suggest looking to VC:MP players.

Nowhere on the internet is there such a group of Vice City enthusiasts than there is here. As Las3r said, if you get a few well known members of the VC:MP community to try your mod and approve, buzz about it would go through the roof. Here's a few insights of mine on what's important and what isn't, that I've drawn from years of playing here:

Important:

- Weapon sync. Above all else, the number one complaint of VC:MP players and those who refuse to play it is the bad weapon sync. If you were to prove yours to be significantly better, you'd already be half way to gaining as much popularity as VC:MP.

- Stability. Previous versions of VC:MP were littered with crashes, players would crash every half an hour or so. The playercount suffered because of this. Since R2 came out, containing very few crashes, the playercount has shot up. (Not completely due to this, but it is certainly a contributory aspect)

- Anti-cheat. Hackers drive people away faster than a stink bomb in an art gallery.

Not important:

- A thousand cool features. The most popular servers in VC:MP are simple as fuck. They allow for pure DM, in a safe (hacker free), stable and free environment. As long as there are cars, guns and other people, players will find a way to have fun.

What I'm trying to say is that it's better to get a stable, sturdy, simple modification than it is to have one with a bamboozling number of embellishments around a core that doesn't work properly. The core is the most important part.

I suggest looking at VC:MP's functionality (best to look at the squirrel wiki for that), see what you can match up to and then focus on a select few improvements or new features; there needn't be anything entirely revolutionary in the first release of a new modification. (I know you already released one and a patch, but let's forget about those :p)

[DECEiFER]

Cutton, I couldn't agree more.

ReGeX and I have a lot in common when it comes to how we prioritize. That's why we're the main constants at VC-O, because of how well we have always gelled. We've always, since RC1, prioritized on the core systems. Features? Barely. We just want the damn thing to work, and within our tightly-knit community, it did work. The functionality we've added to VC-O is a very recent development. The sync systems were completed before any of the frills were added.

Now that we know the client cannot handle more than 4-5 players without coughing up its lungs, ReGeX is going to be starting there before adding anymore features. While we believe features and scripting functions are vital to make the game fun in the long-run, without a solid core base which can stand up tall against the professional multi-player cores out there, then there's little point in adding features. Hell, we haven't even implemented CEGUI into the API. This is planned for the future. It just wasn't a priority to do it by DP1's release. The current chatbox? It's as good as gone, but again, it's not a priority. I've even mocked up a small design in Photoshop of what the chatbox will look like, so ReGeX can implement it (using CEGUI) when the time is right. Trying to get the background color right so that it could look good and allow text of different colors to be readable was the tough part, the current chatbox just doesn't do that well.

You saw it here first:

(the screen shot was taken during the filming of the 1.0 Promotional Video with the current chatbox disabled - the new chatbox you see is simply Photoshopped, but the real McCoy will look nearly identical)

What does use CEGUI is the chatbox, nametags and health bars, main and pause menus, etc. But as yet, not much else.


To summarize: Quite simply, we are ashamed of ourselves for assuming the public beta would work out with over 10 people on a server without testing first. It won't be happening again. No siree!

[Charley]

Alright, good to hear. If you need any help testing then give a shout here. I'm sure there'll be 20+ players on this forum alone willing to help out.

[Knucis]

It's a real honor to have you here in this forum DECEiFER btw
And I agree with Charley's points.

Alright, good to hear. If you need any help testing then give a shout here. I'm sure there'll be 20+ players on this forum alone willing to help out.