Steve's GTA Page

Today marks the fifth anniversary of Steve’s GTA Page. I still remember, back in ye olde days we had nothing but dinosaurs and used to move objects around in GTA III by editing .ipl files by hand! And nowadays, half a decade later, kids have fancy tools to play with, and are waiting for the next generation of GTA with all that futuristic stuff like shaders, realtime shadows, mobile phones, climbing telephone poles and even teh intarwebs. I think I need my pills…

Although it’s not quite complete yet, I decided to put the new site online today to finally get it off my to-do list; hope you like it. However, some parts of the site (like projects, articles and comments) are still missing and should be added over the next few weeks, along with several other small things.

The visual design is pretty much the same as the old one, but “under the hood” everything is new and shiny. The site’s backend has been completely rewritten. Not only are all pages valid XHTML 1.1 now (or HTML 4.01 if your browser doesn’t support it), they also have various improvements in usability and accessability. Futhermore, all written content is now available under a Creative Commons license (see bottom).

Amongst others, the download section has been redesigned. Categories have been reduced to 3 to make things easier, and download profiles now show a bunch of screenshots and a list of files, including alternate versions where applicable. I have also assigned tags to news and downloads (and soon articles) to make it easier to find related content. Speaking of news, an RSS feed is also available now to notify you when the site is updated.

The countdown hit zero, and Rockstar finally released the first official GTA4 trailer, titled “Things Will Be Different”. The location will be Liberty City (NYC) again, and the graphics look pretty damn impressive, just as you would expect from a “next-gen” title. Too bad the trailer didn’t hint at whether the euphoria engine is actually used (as rumored), but we’ll probably find out soon. However, it was confirmed that the trailer “was captured directly from 720p gameplay running real-time in [Rockstar’s] RAGE engine on a next-gen gaming console.” (R*)

As for the new site, I’m almost done coding, but still need to do some design things. Relaunch will take place pretty soon.

A happy new year, everyone! 2006 was quite a silent year, at least from my perspective. I haven’t been very active in the modding scene lately, but if you’ve followed my (rare) news posts here you probably expected that. However, since it’s quite hard to stay away from modding completely, some things actually did get done.

Most of the SA path file format has been decoded and made available at the modding wiki. Also, we have started documenting the RW stream file format there, most notably R*’s custom sections (like 2dfx) and the .txd file format. But none of these are complete yet, everyone is invited to contribute!

Additionally, I’ve been working on a new backend for my website, which produces proper standards-compliant (X)HTML code (unlike now) and will have several improvements in usability and functionality. The relaunch will include updated and extended content, especially more articles and other generally helpful stuff. I initially planned to get this done before the end of the year, but I’ve been too busy and didn’t quite make it. Furthermore, there are plans for some rather interesting tool updates, but more about that when the site is done.

Whether 2007 is going to become another big year for GTA remains to be seen. While GTA4 is scheduled for release on consoles in October, we still don’t know if there’ll be a PC release as well. Modding might become much more unattractive, not just because Rockstar/Take2 are jumping on the episodic content and (possibly) in-game advertising train, which need to be rather secure in order to guarantee the additional cash flow those are supposed to generate. They are also likely to be more paranoid and scared of another Hot Coffee incident now, although I doubt something like that would happen again anytime soon (both developers and modders certainly drew a lesson from that). I just hope they don’t continue ignoring the positive potential of the modding community and actually give us some support in the future.

May 2007 become a successful and productive year for all of us.

Grand Theft Auto IV was announced at E3 today, scheduled for simultaneous release on PS3 and Xbox360 in October 2007. An official teaser site has been set up by R* as well.

Apparently there will be exclusive episodic content available via Xbox Live. And modders will surely be locked out right from the start. But there won’t be a PC release within the next 2 years anyway, so no point in ranting quite yet.

Related T2 press releases:

• Rockstar Games announces Grand Theft Auto IV for the Xbox 360™ and PLAYSTATION®3 computer entertainment system
• “Grand Theft Auto IV” Comes to Xbox 360 on Day One

Hey everyone, I hope you enjoyed the holidays. Santa even left you a present: the long-awaited Collision File Editor II! Yea, you read right. Browse over to the new microsite at ce2.steve-m.com and grab your download!

Also, I want to take the opportunity to announce that I won’t continue developing modding software for GTA anymore, at least until a new game is out. This is not only because of very limited free time due to uni, but also because I (like many people in the modding community) am very disappointed with the complete lack of official and (especially since Hot Coffee) unofficial modding support by Rockstar. While other big game franchises have dedicated official modding community portals, with collections of documentation, tools and SDKs, behind-the-scenes articles, developer blogs and interviews, and developers actively posting in forums, we have exactly… nothing. Thanks R*.

Everyone else, enjoy CE2 and have a happy new year!

And yet another update to the Map Viewer, this time with LUA scripting interface, and two sample scripts, like an automatic radar texture creator, and a camera flight along SA’s train tracks.

The Map Viewer has been slightly updated with some user-requested features, like taking screenshots, disabling textures, but also the rendering of night vertex colors.

A new version of the Map Viewer is available, featuring LODs, interiors and many other goodies. For more information, see this post or the readme.

Since I won’t have much time to continue working on my Map Viewer the next weeks, and due to the many requests I received, I decided to publish the current alpha version. Remember that it’s still quite user-unfriendly, and far away from being finished.

On another note, I was working on my new CollEditor II recently, and been making great progress. Collision files of all 3 formats can be loaded, converted and saved perfectly already, and simple col object management and surface manipulation is also possible. Expect a first beta soon.