Fairly important news post here. With a few things.

Firstly, i'd like to announce that LU has lost a developer. himselfe left the dev team on Monday 30th august, we're sad to see him go.
himselfe is responsible for quite a bit of the internal stuff in LU, like some stability patches and the entry/exit anims, aswell as a lot of other things.
So LU is left with 3 real developers again. Me, Juppi and AdTec_224 (Since Mike has never done anything anyway)

Next, a more merrier issue (ish).

We have been discussing LU lately and due to being 1 developer short and the rest of us either not having the time or incentive to work on it, we've came to the decision to give the community a say on whether or not we should release it in its current state.

This does not mean we are giving up on it, quite the opposite infact. The purpose of a release would give us more incentive to work on it and perfect it gradually, without the thought of 'lets just get it released soon'.

The decision was made, based on the success of the recent public test, to put it to a vote.

Should we release it in its current state? With a proper browser, setup and an automatic updater (So that we can update all clients/servers easily with bug fixes as we fix them). The current state of the mod itself is basically the same as the public test, with a couple of fixes added.

We will run the poll for 30 days, which will give us time to polish the mod up in case you all decide we should release.
After that we will either release, or keep working on it and testing privately.

Update (08/08/2010)

Public beta has been closed! Thanks everyone for participating!

--

We're throwing a party! i mean... public beta!

Just to test out the stability and make sure theres no big, obvious bugs left. Theres still a few small bugs but we've decided its good enough for a pub beta

The browser is NOT the finished one, its just one we threw together in a few minutes so its buggy. Theres an alternative old browser Here if your having problems.

Remember! You need gta3 1.1 to play. If you run GTA and you get a black screen, that pressing enter or space closes, then you dont have 1.1.

You can get the setup file Here. Sorry about the msi, was easy to create and wont be the finished installer.

Update: (31/07/2010) Another update. Fixed the player being in the incorrect seat and hopefully being thrown out the vehicle randomly. Theres other improvements but thats the main. Download above, or  Here if you have already installed.

On a side note, this update (31/7/2010) also fixes the 3d positional audio with Mumble. When mumble is configured correctly, you can hear players speaking from where they are in game, getting louder the closer they are and taking advantage of surround systems.
Theres a voice server running at mumble.liberty-unleashed.co.uk if anybody wants to try it

Hope to see you in game!

Known Issues

• Server name in the scoreboard is bigger than the board itself
• Graphics corruption if using a 16bit resolution (If you have purple blocks on the screen, this is why)
• Warpy vehicle sync, with a ped 'flying' behind the car. Currently investigating this
• Sometimes cant passenger in a car, possibly due to a variation of the above issue
• Being around too many exploding cars can cause a crash
• Passengers radar blips are 'jerky'
• Cars sometimes dont explode, we're looking into it

Will add to this list when i remember more.

Info

• To spawn, press the right ctrl
• To enter as a passenger, press the enter key near to any passenger door. To enter as driver, do the same next to the drivers door
• If you wish to change your skin, press F4
• The chatbox and console can be customised. Type commands in the console (activated with the ` key)
• As some people prefer to have no chatbox background, theres /chatback off
• The speedo, sounds etc are client side scripts. If you want to look at the client scripts loaded, navigate to Documents/GTA3 User Files/LU/Scripts
• There are currently 2 scripts loaded on the server, one is producing an invalid command error even when its valid. Just ignore it
• A few useful commands in the loaded scripts are: /wep <id> /spawncar <id/name> /fixme /heal /c1 <r g b> /c2 <r g b>

Please can you report any crashes or bugs to the bug tracker Here

Long time no 'proper' news, so heres some!

Just lately we've been coding a lot and we've been testing almost every day for the last week or so with great success!
Some of you may have noticed various new videos on my xfire profile and the LUTesters user on youtube, but for those of you that havn't seen them, here they are:


This one shows off a bunch of us testing the new and improved vehicle sync. Please ignore the occasional stuttering, thats down to xfire


This one was just testing how the dodo looked when flying as a passenger, also shows the animations on entering


This one i was testing how smooth sync was when passengering with an insane ping. You may notice in the video that my ping was 1100!

A few more videos can be found at http://www.xfire.com/profile/vrocker/videos/

A video that AdTec_224 took of the vehicle sync can be found here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9BIrguZkJ4

Further videos will be uploaded to the LUTesters group so keep an eye on it!

As you can see from the videos, the vehicle sync is better than its ever been, and apart from a few small issues that we're currently fixing, its almost finished.

We're now working at full speed to get all the issues found during private testing fixed, so we can release it to the public verify theres no major issues. If all goes well we should have a release shortly after!

Watch this space for more videos and updates

Some of you may be aware that steams having some great sales on Rockstar Games this week and they seem worthy of a news post.

The Rockstar collection is half price all week, which is 13 games for £29.99! It includes GTA3 (Which LU will work on when released) aswell as the latest GTA4 and Episodes from Liberty City.

Link

Hoping for a nice deal on GTA3 like there was for GTA:VC so then theres no reason for people to not own the game.

Edit: The full GTA Classic Pack is on sale for the next 4ish hours or so for only £4.24! This is all the GTAs from I to SA, including what we all want, III. Excellent bargain so go and buy it!

Link!

Edit: Sale has now finished

On a side note: LU development is continuing slowly, really hoping to have something to show like some vids or a public beta soon.

Threw up a counterstrike source server recently due to the sale steam had last weekend.
Has a bunch of maps, some good scripts and is fun to play

Its hosted on my dedi so lag should be minimal.

Heres some funky banner with the info:


Hope to see you in game one day

Forum looks a bit dead lately so heres a random thread!

Post your GTA4 benchmarks here

Heres mine:

Statistics
Average FPS: 57.67
Duration: 37.21 sec
CPU Usage: 69%
System memory usage: 73%
Video memory usage: 77%

Graphics Settings
Video Mode: 1680 x 1050 (60 Hz)
Texture Quality: High
Texture Filter Quality: High
View Distance: 52
Detail Distance: 100

Hardware
Microsoft Windows 7 Professional
Video Adapter: ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series
Video Driver version: 8.14.10.678
Audio Adapter: Speakers (Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Audio)
AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 955 Processor

* VRocker hugs his 1GB Radeon 4870 and his Phenom 955

Like the title says, What do you think about LU? I've heard some people saying its useless because nobody plays GTA3 but i would like to know what you guys think.

Also what kind of things would you like to know about LU that havn't been answered elsewhere?

I guess this thread would be better if we had actually released something, but we're working on it!

LU these days is racing along towards a release and to help us along i've recruited another new developer.

Many of you may know him from VC-MP and other places, his name... Juppi

He has been a tester for quite some time now and is a wizard at Squirrel. Just recently he helped me in a project to implement Squirrel into a VCMP server, which went very well.
Now his talents are going into LU to help speed up a release

Hope to have some results soon! Stay posted and keep an eye on the dev blog

Heres something me, Juppi and Knight2k9 have been working on for a while. Its a remake of the VCMP 0.3z server which has new features, better stability and inbuilt scripting!
This server can be used to learn Squirrel in preperation for Liberty Unleashed. The naming and usage of the functions etc are similar to LU to make it easier to learn.

The server has been thoroughly tested and doesn't have the exploits the original server has. This includes crashes (so conventional server crashers cant kill the server).
It also has inbuilt server-side scripting support via Squirrel. This allows you to make scripts and not have to run mIRC 24/7 for them to work.
A list of script functions/callbacks can be found at http://liberty-unleashed.co.uk/VCWiki/Scripting/squirrel

As you can see from the script functions, you can now Mute players, make an ignore list and disable drivebys.

To use this server, modify the server.conf file with your details. This is basically a normal config file but in XML.
Then borrow the Announce.exe from the original VCMP server and plae it in the same directory as the new server.
Run the server and hey presto, a newer, crashproof server

You can download the server Here (Or linux server Here)
If you wish to script with mirc still, a single connection DLL is available Here

Any bugs or help with scripting, post here and someone will help out

Just a quick note to announce 2 new developers in the Liberty Unleashed team.

AdTec_224 and himselfe are now helping in development of this mod. They are both very good coders so should advance the mod towards a release in the near future.

Everybody give a nice welcome to these 2 guys

Just a quick post to let people know about another multiplayer mod which is being released today.

Vice City Online is a project founded by ReGeX and Koolio. The mod has advanced features over the current VC multiplayer mods and shows real potential in becoming a great online experience in the land of Vice City.

On release i will be playing for a while and hope to see others around

More information can be found at the website: http://www.gtagaming.com/vco

Oh and join #vco on irc.gtanet.com (stop by #gta-lu if your not already there!)

Sorry for site being down the last few days. There has been unexpected problems with the host which caused the account to be suspended.

The good news is that we're back online

From everybody on the Liberty Unleashed team, we wish you all a very merry christmas and a happy new year!

Thanks to everyone for testing. Enough data has been collected to keep me busy for a while fixing bugs and tweaking things

The server is now closed and the files have been taken offline.

Thanks again. I will post when more testing is required, which should be in january sometime

Thought i'd make a topic on the scripting language used in Liberty Unleashed due to most of it being in the wish list.

LU uses Squirrel for scripting. Squirrel is easy to use and is designed specifically for game scripting.
I chose Squirrel due to it being similar in ways to Lua, but also having the syntax which is C-like. Once you learn Squirrel you will see it is a very powerful language and boasts many nice features.
Another reason why Squirrel was chosen is that its very easy to impliment. Being easy to impliment means i can spend less time messing around with the scripts and more time with the actual code.

One of its nice features is that i can make my own variable types and impliment them into the scripting (via SqPlus) which allows me to pass data to the scripts as Vectors or full classes, making less work for me but also keeping the scripts easy to use.

There is some documentation on Squirrels internal functions Here which is a modified version of the original document, but with the C++ stuff removed.

I will make an application to practice Squirrel on soon, instead of having to release the server. This should help in understanding it and why it has been chosen.