No your not imagining things, this is actually an update!
Theres been quite a lot of changes in the LU world recently. We really should have had a release by now but theres been problems here n there and it doesn't help that i'm kinda lazy
Anyway, in the last news post i announce that LU had a new developer. Unfortunately he hasn't really done much and we havn't spoke to eachother for a while so it seems we've both gone our seperate ways. Luckily this hasn't set back the mod since i have still been coding alone.
When i recruited savage, we agreed that the mod should be recoded from scratch using new methods to increase stability and usability. I'm happy to say the core recode has been going very well!
This recode includes a lot of good things. One of which being a proper GUI system similar to MTA:SAs. The GUI has been made from the ground up by me and so far its coming along very well. It isn't quite finished yet but is in a useable state. With this GUI system and scripting you will be able to create your own menus and stuff to enhance the users gameplay and your server
And for everyone thats concerned that the new GUI will have an impact on performance, i'm happy to say it doesn't. I've successfully had many windows, text labels and memoboxes scattered around the entire screen on a low end system without losing a significant ammount of FPS.
Heres a small screenshot showing the LU console which was made with the GUI system. The titlebar is optional and it can be moved, resized and customized to how you like it. It also has a nice fading effect when its shown/hidden which is optional.
Another thing the recode has done is made the mod smaller, easier to manage and easier on resources. The netcode has also been redone once again and bandwidth usage has been greatly reduced. At this time i do not have an exact bandwidth usage per player but i can tell you its less than it used to be (Old core sent about 990B/s per player for footsync)
Few more things i've done to the game. I've managed to disable all kinds of things which would usually interfere with a multiplayer game. One thing i've done is completely disabled AI police (Helicopters, boats, cars and ped) so the wanted stars are usable without some annoying AI coming along and killing you
All the ped AI and vehicle AI have been disabled at the highest level so the game doesn't even attempt to load any, this frees up a bit of memory and game resources so it can run that tiny bit better
Some more good news (Mainly for you linux fans)... The LU server has successfully been ported over to Gentoo so at the moment we have a Windows and a Gentoo server
Since i'm not that good on linux i'm not sure if the gentoo server will work on any other linux distributions but if it doesn't, it shouldn't be too hard to compile them for any distribution
Well i guess i'll wrap this news post up now. As you can see the mods not dead and is starting to get more active again
