[Eurochron]

Hello guys and hello to the LU Team. 
Thanks for creating the LU Mod! I can see the hard work you have put into it.

I was wondering why the LU source is in the hand of only a few people,
instead of uploading it on github so anyone can help to improve the source.

I did not read all the forum-posts, so I don't know the full story (yet).
But it seems like the current devs have their hands full with real-life stuff,
which I can understand, but it is rather slowing down the progress of this Multiplayer-Mod.

Community seems to be rather dead aswell, but that is another story.

[Offtopic / Story]
A friend and I recently decided to start playing the GTA 3 Multiplayer together.
We were hoping to get some kind of GTA 3 co-op experience.
But since there does not seem to be one, I decided to create a simple racing script instead.
- race-tracks are stored in a file and can be created by everyone on the server, dynamically
- which means there are no hard-coded race-tracks and they can be edited in real-time

I am 27 and know C/C++/C# very well.
I did never use Squirrel before, but the Synthax seems to be the same. So I feel at home using it.
My simple racing script is working (with record times and personal best times)

[Back to topic]
I noticed some bugs in the windows server 0.1.0.16 and it would be cool to fix them myself,
but I don't have the access to the source (sadly).
Windows server 0.1.0.17 won't stay open and just closes without any messages.


@devs: I hope you guys will think about a open-source release, before the source gets lost
or everyone stops working on it. You put so much effort in it over the years, it would be sad
to lose all that and not improve on it until the bugs are gone.

Thank you.

-Eurochron

[Theremin]

Also you do not know about what the old players can do, they know every thing about LU, inclusive hacks and exploits, we have a lot of crashers and DDoSers who can turn off your server in seconds.

You will learn if you can stay here for long time.

I disagree with everything except the bit I quoted. LU old players, the bad ones, along with LU's nasty bugs are what drives newcomers away.

I also share my own fair cut of knowledge about LU in general, so you if you need any help feel free to shoot me a PM. As for the 0.17 server you're not the only one having this problem and I know the solution until the devs ever fix it in a next update. Though the solution will be useless for you since you're making a racing gamemode: Remove all the vehicles and pickups to be loaded both from content.xml and scripts. Also if you happen to spawn a vehicle even after the server loaded, it will still crash. Good luck with your server, may you succeed where others failed

[Eurochron]

Having to deal with hackers, DDoSers and exploiters is a problem in many multiplayer games,
especially with community created mods (since the devs will fokus on bug-free software first).

Making something open source can and will improve the security of the software in the long run.
But it is true, that open source software (like anything else) will also attract the attention of people,
who want to do bad things with it and who will try to find and use exploits.
Making these exploits visible for everyone does give the chance of fixing them at some point.

I have read some of the posts in this Forum and I have seen the videos of existing racing scripts.
But they are also non-public and the servers are offline. Which is just sad.
I hope these scripts are not lost, because you can see the work hours someone has put into it.
A good (racing) script is a work of days or even weeks with good planning and community feedback.

Creating a racing script might not be something new, but if you look around the forum you wont
find any open source / script examples for a race either.
So what do new players do, if they want to race?
Either they quit or they create their own script (if they have the know-how).


The decision of making somthing open source is always in the hand of the dev(s).
Sharing hours or days/weeks of work with other people for free can feel strange at first,
but with a good community you can improve the source together and fix bugs faster.


Offtopic - Just to make it clear:
I am not planning on creating a big racing server with my current script.
The script I have right now is very basic and only intended for my buddy and I to have some fun.
I don't want anyone to get his hopes started on a new racing server.


Have a good day, all.
-Eurochron

[Vortrex]

Welcome to Liberty Unleashed, Eurochron.
Please pay no attention to the rudeness of the guy with the question mark username. He's spawned many servers, but the "success" of them is questionable. Each one has been repeatedly turned off and back on for years. More off than on, too.

I both agree and disagree with the idea of open source for Liberty Unleashed. I think it's a good idea to allow people to provide fixes and features. However, I think we'd have several new half-assed modifications show up claiming they are either LU or better.

Anyway, good luck with your racing server. We used to have one, but it hasn't been online for a while.

[Eurochron]

Welcome to Liberty Unleashed, Eurochron.

Thank you. 

You are right about the possibility of half-assed modifications.
But I have seen it being organised quite well with other software. As long as someones tries
to keep the LU website/forum up to date about these modifications, then they can be merged (by someone).

There still might be people that use the source to do their own stuff without sharing.
You can't prevent that and it is one of the reasons why the devs have to decide on their own,
if and when LU might become Open Source (or not).

[Vortrex]

Who cares?

Oh, and speaking of the RPG project, I haven't updated Github in a while. I have couple thousand lines of code to add to it. I need to make a forum topic for details.

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk

[Vortrex]

Once again, who cares.

Let's give this guy his thread back.

[Eurochron]

I really enjoyed playing with my buddy on my local server over the last few days.
Got to know LU server and client v0.1.0.16 and the list of known bugs got a bit longer for us.
(funny moments with cars changing colour on collision sometimes) 

But we are both quite impressed with the Liberty Unleashed Multiplayer Mod. 
Would be nice for me to speak to a dev someday and maybe get my hands onto the LU source code.
I really want to have a good look at it and maybe I could help to improve it some more.


My local server does now have 2 fully working game modes:

racing mode:
- dynamic race track with unlimted checkpoints (can be created and edited by players on the server)
- 1 vs 1
- pick any car
- fastest time wins
- record times and personal best times get stored and displayed

escape mode:
- dynamic escape track with unlimted checkpoints (can be created and edited by players on the server)
- 1 cop (ID 116) vs 1 escaping player (ID 100, slower car)
- escaping player has a time limit for each track
- cop has to try to ram/crash the escaping player to slow him down
- if the escaping player can finish the "race track" within the time, he wins
- if the cop can slow down the escaping player enough, cop wins
- note: both players should have good pings in order to enjoy this game mode


These two modes are currently designed to work with only 2 players,
because I scripted them for my local server to have some fun with my buddy.
But I am sure they could be changed to manage more people.

This Forum does not seem to have any racing mode code snippets, so I might post some soon.
Maybe there will be some players who want to race and will be happy about these snippets.

I have had some problems with the use of global values and also with the use of client scripts,
but after some debugging I got it working and I understand how to convert the parameters now.
Learned quite a lot about the scripting for LU and it was interesting and fun so far.


7 days of LU / GTA 3 Multiplayer so far. It is great fun! Thanks @devs!
-Eurochron

[2204]

Also the LU source will be always private, because there are good and bad people in the world, and the bad people can use the code to fuck us and also take credits.

I have never understood this argument for keeping software closed source. Yes, there are bad people who will look at the code to find exploits. But what does it matter? #1: There are already people who find exploits in closed source software. There are tons of exploits discovered nearly daily for Windows and MS Office, both of which are closed source software. Keeping it closed won't prevent anyone who is determined from finding a vulnerability. People have already found nasty exploits for LU in spite of it being closed source. #2: The good guys will submit a patch for said exploit and distribute it to server owners and players.

As for taking credit I have honestly only seen this twice in the open source community and both times it was found out pretty quickly and the projects were shut down.

As for the "half-assed mods", its easy enough to avoid them.

Personally I would love to see an open source LU, it seems like a really cool concept to me. But I know it'll more likely than not never happen.

[SugarD]

Also the LU source will be always private, because there are good and bad people in the world, and the bad people can use the code to fuck us and also take credits.

I have never understood this argument for keeping software closed source. Yes, there are bad people who will look at the code to find exploits. But what does it matter? #1: There are already people who find exploits in closed source software. There are tons of exploits discovered nearly daily for Windows and MS Office, both of which are closed source software. Keeping it closed won't prevent anyone who is determined from finding a vulnerability. People have already found nasty exploits for LU in spite of it being closed source. #2: The good guys will submit a patch for said exploit and distribute it to server owners and players.

As for taking credit I have honestly only seen this twice in the open source community and both times it was found out pretty quickly and the projects were shut down.

As for the "half-assed mods", its easy enough to avoid them.

Personally I would love to see an open source LU, it seems like a really cool concept to me. But I know it'll more likely than not never happen.

If the community was more involved and motivated the Developers into constant development, this *could* eventually happen. (Of course, it would be completely at their discretion). Right now, though, no one is doing much but ****ting on the mod. This only pushes the chances of it going open source even farther away.

[Eurochron]

@2204: I agree. Well stated.

[Romop5]

In my opinion, even if LU was open-sourced, it wouldn't be possible to make it flawless and exploit-proof.

As far as I know, all fan multiplayer modifications are using original game's engine to calculate player's movements and collisions (please, correct me if someone has changed this and created a server-side collision simulation based on game files like standard multiplayers such as Call of Duty, Counter-Strike, etc. do). Thus, almost everything has its origin in client's PC and the major purpose of server is to broadcast data to other clients.

I think you can feel the source of problems - it's impossible to verify if anything from client has been forged. The impact of releasing any multiplayer like this is showing how data are treated (and verified) and make it others easy to bypass this mechanism.

If someone wants to provide a flawless multiplayer modification for any game, a server-side physics and game simulation is required. Personally, I think it shouldn't be so demanding to use/reverse GTA game files to extract data about world, objects and collisions and to create a copy of GTA physics, already based on existing engines (e.g. http://bulletphysics.org/wordpress/).

In conclusion, I hardly believe that LU will ever be released as an open source SW as it'd be pretty pointless to do so. I've done that with my multiplayer modification for Mafia (LHMP) https://github.com/LHMPTeam/lhmp-old , but open-source projects without active creators are almost all dead and no one will continue to develop something he can't fully understand (otherwise he'd created his own one).