The GTA Series and Multiplayer

Without a doubt, almost every gamer in the world is familiar with the Grand Theft Auto series. This began with GTA, a 3d game in which the player had a somewhat open-eneded city to explore and do missions in. The player could choose to move around by vehicle, train, or on foot. Grand Theft Auto had multiplayer support, but at the same time had a rather sketchy and unoptimized netcode.

In this case it meant that the developers wrote an efficient enough network code such that even minor lag would not be interpolated or smoothed out, and any non-network game would be ridiculously laggy and would randomly become out of sync with the other players. Grand Theft Auto was followed by GTA2 which also had multiplayer support, although the sad fact remained that the netcode was still horrendous.

After GTA2, the gaming world saw the emergence of GTA3, created by Rockstar on their own internal engine, the same engine which would be used on the next two titles in the series. Grand Theft Auto III was the first 3D title of the series, set in a brilliantly radiant game world, which along with the on-foot/vehicle gameplay made the game almost revolutionary for the time. The annoyingly sad fact about this game, however, was that it had absolutely no netcode.

GTA3 was followed by Vice City, and later by San Andreas. These games were essentially on the same engine, but with slight modifications such as an improved renderer, ragdoll engine, and physics engine which would allow for other vehicles to be implemented properly into the game. Still, however, the only GTA series game to have true multiplayer was GTA:Liberty City Stories, which although was released for both the PS2 and the PSP, only had multiplayer on the latter platform.

With the last three games of Rockstar's most popular series lacking multiplayer, you'd think by now someone would have attempted to impliment multiplayer for it. Well, they did. The first group was called MTA (Multi Theft Auto) and they had a working version after the release of GTA3, and later went on to release MTA:VC. Both of these mods were, and still are horrible. They were plagued with crashes, and the synchronization was terrible. This was because with no access to the source code of the game engine, the only way to modify it was through memory hacking, which almost always gives rather unstable results.

Another group called SA-MP was working on a multiplayer mod for San Andreas even before the release of the game. They tailored what would soon be SA-MP and tested it out on the Vice City engine, titling their first release vc-mp, which was a vast improvement over the oldschool MTA releases. The team went on to release SA-MP which supports about 200 players per server and works well enough to be both playable and fun at the same time.